Added 1 Aug 2021:
Thanks to Malcolm Dean, I have learnt that the Springwatch episodes are now freely available on Youtube. Episode 5 is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV6ZHe0CiHw
The section on "Avocet Island" starts at about 12min 23sec. The above 35 second extract, showing competences of newly hatched avocets, starts at about 12mins 30secs.
The video demonstrates competences in hatchlings only a few hours old, that could not have been produced by individual learning mechanisms in the time available since hatching.
They must therefore have been produced by chemical processes during development of the chicks, inside their eggs.
Mechanisms capable of achieving that, especially within the time limits and also size, weight and energy limits of an egg, are not explained (as far as I can tell) by anything known to researchers in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, biology, embryology, physics, chemistry, biochemistry, chemical engineering, AI, ...
Specifying requirements for an adequate explanation is a non-trivial task.
Fashionable neural net theories cannot be relevant because most of the development has happened inside the egg, and chick embryos cannot be trained in the task environment. After hatching they use those competences, without having had opportunities to train neural nets between hatching and feeding themselves on the river.
Part of what needs to be explained is how brains, and all their neural mechanisms, are created in an egg, along with all the other physiological components, and all their connections.
Finding explanatory mechanisms first involves analysing the requirements to be met by such mechanisms, which are far from obvious, as nothing produced by humans so far comes close to matching these achievements, either in designs for robots or in explanations of biological or psychological phenomena that I have encountered.
The Meta-Morphogenesis (M-M) project, begun around 2011, triggered by
preparations for the Alan Turing Centenary year, is a search for such
mechanisms, the biological requirements that led to their evolution, and the
features of the physical world that make all those processes and their products
possible.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html
On 2nd June 2021, some of the details were presented to the
Carl-Friedrich von Weizsaecker Center Tuebingen University:
A recording of the presentation is included in their Youtube collection here
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaG1Q8TEuLN5OJZXaTL28PQ.
My talk is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbh8E3Pk0R0
Unfortunately it was an unscripted "talking head" presentation, because zoom
crashed each time I tried to switch to "Shared Screen" mode.
So I could not display the avocet clip. I also could not display any of my
notes, images, videos, prepared for use during the presentation, most of which
were used in a later presentation based on this document:
https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/sloman-PhiloWeb.html
There are several other directly relevant presentations and online papers. I may add a list here later!
I suggest that only hitherto unknown chemical mechanisms, possibly including chemically-implemented virtual machinery, can meet the explanatory requirements, including explaining how newly hatched, untrained animals can perform complex feats in complex environments, as illustrated by the avocets. I also suspect that such mechanisms are part of what made possible a great many geometric and topological discoveries and also engineering designs and constructions centuries before Pythagoras, Euclid, Archimedes, and other mathematicians of their era.
For a more detailed, but still disorganised discussion of the issues see:
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/sloman-morcom.html