We know they're capable of passing complex information onto each other. What "a bad man's face" looks like for instance, I'm sure some of HN has seen the documentaries on their abilities.

I wonder if they choose nesting material based on insulation properties also. Cigarette stubs are probably great for stuffing into cracks and it is known that plugging air gaps dramatically increases whole house/nest insulation value.

Do birds spend time observing the nest of their peers? AFAIK the only nests they care about are their own (though I'm definitely not an ornithologist, I'm mostly ignorant about them in general).

But that's the beauty of Darwinism, whether the information is stored in the genes or in their culture (memetically) doesn't matter, the selection/amplification process is the same.

i'm wondering if 15-25 generations (that's approximately how many generations of garden birds were there since the invention of the cigarettes with filters) are enough for evolution to actually show this trend here

Cue fun time with etymology: understand translated to Latin and back yields support, which is significant, kinda, because support vectors are one model of machine intelligence, while DNA is basically a vector, in terms of transcription, or a matrix even, looking closer at the base molecules.

disclaimer: I have n o idea about support vectors, to be honest