We appreciate the beautiful birdsong we hear in our gardens every morning, and we admire the way they gracefully glide through the air, but when it comes to intelligence birds often get a bad rap. The term "birdbrain" commonly used as an insult towards any human we appraise to be acting stupidly or dim; stemming from the basic observation that birds have small brains compared to their body size.
However, though bird's brains do look tiny compared to their size, the main reason for this is that birds have to be buoyant, in order to fly. Meaning their mass is spread out over a greater area. Birds have air sacs in their bodies, and hollow bones. They have to be super light. If you've ever looked at a plump little robin redbreast and wondered how something so portly can dance through the air with so little effort it's because they're buoyant as well as aerodynamic. They're like little balloons with wings.
If you hold a mouse or gerbil in your hand they have a bit of weight, like a little bag of sand, but a bird of similar size feels light. So it's not so much that birds have small heads and brains, but rather that they have big bodies - as the mass of their body is spread out over a greater area of space than it would need to be if they were land animals that didn't have to fly.
So birds aren't as dense as we think they are.
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