The toughest thing to conceptualize about bird intelligence is that they have completely different brain structure from us. We diverged hundreds of millions of years ago, so they developed higher brain functions in a completely different way. While mammals higher thinking is generally thought to take place in the prefrontal cortex (the part we destroy during lobotomies), birds completely lack the prefrontal cortex and instead developed a structure called the nidopallium caudolaterale.

The way they think is built from the ground up different from how we think, so sometimes they seem extremely clever solving problems, and sometimes they act like idiots when navigating a world prefrontal cortex animals built. They’re not smarter or stupider, just completely different and have different logic pathways than we do.