What is it like to be a bower bird?
An essay on consciousness by SPT

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Currently popular models of consciousness overwhelmingly assert the following historical development:
  • Human languages develop, for communication or bonding.
  • Human thought becomes more complex, honed by the new tool of language.
  • Humans become capable of building mental models of their own and other thought processes.
Contemplation of these mental models is indivisibly bound up with consciousness. So, no other animals have minds remotely similar to ours.

Would non-linguistic mental models of a creature's own thought processes lead to consciousness? What would such a consciousness be like? Gentle reader, continue, and one possibility will be described.
This future natural history is written in the light of complete ignorance of bower birds, beyond the males' construction of elaborate nests (follies) in the endless endeavor to impress and attract females.  Expect all statements of fact to be false.
The male bower bird builds his nest in the attempt to impress and attract females.   The more elaborate the nest, the greater the chance of procreating (runaway sexual selection, Darwin, peacocks, et cetera ad nauseam). The original purpose, for the female, was to choose a mate with stamina - the offspring will have stamina, and they will be well-fed in the critical early years (well, weeks).

As generations pass, life becomes harder (or at least more complex) for the bower bird "community". (I use scare-quotes because there is no true community of bower birds - only couples and their clutches). More specifically, finding food for the hatchlings requires a large helping of resourcefulness, planning, inventiveness - not simply stamina. The females of the species begin to demand evidence of these qualities in the display nests.
How can the males best display inventiveness in their nests? Build a different nest each year? But they mate for life, and have only one chance at each female. Build endless nests of different types? But each previous nest was a test of stamina in itself. A pattern emerges: the nests become more closely related to the males' repertoire of problem-solving and food-seeking behavior. The nests:-
  • Express patterns of seeking food by elaborate spirals of twisted stalks.
  • Express each known source of food by its most salient feature: a feather, a drop of water, a stone.
  • Express inventiveness through the uses of a single leaf.
  • Express single-mindedness in feeding the hatchlings by the redundant organization of the display nest.
After the female invention of fashion, the males must reinvent their nests each year, attempting to show the same information in ever-changing forms.  As time goes by, there is a shift from enumeration:
  • the different known food-seeking patterns

to representation of mental states:

  • how does the male think about searching for food?
This representation is completely unconscious. The male is simply building the best nest he can to attract the babes.
And yet the nest is a representation, a model, of the mind of the male bower bird.   This model is viewed by, communicated to, any interested females.  Those males who are unsuccessful one year study their successful rivals' nests, and internalize the represented schemata.  Each year, the unsuccessful males learn from the successful ones.  They reflect upon their own thought processes and upon those of others, through the mediation of the nest; each new meme is explicitly accepted or rejected.
The combination of the male bower bird plus his nest is arguably conscious.