I live next to a farm in a rural town. We have lots of cats around which are necessary to keep the rodents in check. Our cats love to play their prey to death in our yard (yeah nature is cruel).
Some of the local crows know how to get the dead mice from the cats. One or two crows distract the cat, the cat likes to chase the crows for the thrill of the hunt, and then one crow swoops in and steals the cats prey. The cats are always bamboozled when this happens and we watch and laugh. Really smart these feathered freaks :D
I leave shelled peanuts and other bird feed out in the winter, and is fascinating to watch the crows and magpies to crack them open, feed on some of them, then grab two shelled peanuts and fly off with them. They already recognize me coming out in the winter mornings with the bird feed and peanut bags. They wait patiently in the surrounding trees until I'm in the house again. They even see me through the windows watching them and only come down to feed once I am out of sight for them. Truly remarkable.
We also have some pairs of red kites in our area which circle over our fields for prey. The crows don't like them and will try to chase them away, mostly in packs of two to three crows. They are 99% successful in chasing the red kites away because they are more agile in the air and can do more complex flight manouvers. But once one of the crows got to close to the claws of the kite and was killed instantly and dropped down dead. What happened then was even more fascinating. The whole flock of crows gathered around their dead companion and maybe "mourned"? I don't know how to else explain it.
Next winter I will try to befriend them even more, they are so fascinating!
I've heard the crow "funeral" is an information gathering strategy. Figuring out what killed it, what risks are in the area, how to mitigate it happening again.
Anecdata: I see this in the park next to my house. Two crows will repeatedly chase and tail-pull an Egyptian goose that has no food and nothing they could want. Hard to read it as anything other than play, which lines up with documented corvid tail-pulling of eagles, cats, etc.
One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something.
It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the sidewalk, a pretty sizable rock smacked the pavement next to me, seemingly out of nowhere. If it had hit my head I would have been hurt. I finally look up and see a big crow staring directly down at me - it had dropped it from the power lines, it had seemingly been intentional, maybe as a warning, I don't know. I attributed it to malice towards the vagrants that harass them.
I was amazed at how much intelligence it would take to 1) form a grudge 2) form intent to threaten/harm, 3) formulate a plan using a weapon with cause -> effect to execute intent, 4) wait for opportunity.
I have observed a lot of very intelligent behaviors from these birds but that was the wildest one. I have seen it happen once since, so I'm convinced it isn't an accident.
Crows in country will wait for a newborn deer to be left alone in a field by their mothers shortly after birth to peck the baby's eyes out so it dies and the crow can eat it later. My neighbor had told me about this happening, and maybe a month later I saw a fawn with its eyes pecked out shortly after it had died. The doe just sat at the edge of the field by it all night. So sad, but really smart of the crows.
Crows have also been known to alert predators like wolves to easy prey so they can pick the remains.
the evil here seems to be being a predator, which for the doe it would be reasonable to say the predator is evil, but examining the natural order of things from outside, as a human observing the doe, the fawn, and the crows, that is a pretty weird judgement to make. The predator has evolved to eat the prey, if that is evil then nature is evil or if you like, whatever created nature.
'Evil' is a human characterisation, and is not applicable to animals imo; to apply it is to anthropomorphise the animal.
An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
The longer I live the more evidence I see the barrier between humans and other animals is thinner than we would like to imagine.
So I counter you with a practical question: can a crow commit a social transgression that will result in punishment by other crows? My strong suspicion is that the answer is yes, though I would love documentation as it would suggest a crow-cultural definition of morality
I agree. But I don't think pecking the eyes of a deer, thereby providing all the crows food, would be considered 'evil'/'bad' by other crows. I think crows would acclaim the action as 'good'/'right'.
We have rescue dog (abandoned on the street) and it seems to have a notion that violence within family is bad.
I was quite surprised to see that when I mock threatened my wife with a broom in his presence he jumped in to block. Not only that, he took the broom away from me and secured it away. I initially thought it was play, that he wanted to play with the broom. Seems he was just interested in separating me from the broom. He is our household saint.
We have a much younger dog (another rescue) who is not very nice at all to our saint. However, if my body language has even a hint of a threat to our little devil, he sure gets perked up and ready to protect.
This probably comes from pack behavior instinct. Fights inside a pack is bad.
I suspect the corvids aren't obligate carnivores and so they could choose not to eat animals but they do it anyway.
Given that humans aren't obligate carnivores and further more, are capable of advanced chemistry so that even if they were obliged to eat other animals biologically they could just work around this without needing to kill anything - it seems much more compelling to judge us by such a metric than them. We decided that we liked steak so much we would deliberately raise cows just to eat them, the crow can't be anywhere near that "evil" if that's how we're characterising this outcome.
I think evil is an an artificial and subjective construct and therefore intelligence will somehow do something “evil” by someone’s or something’s standard.
But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.
As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.
And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).
So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.
> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
No.
E.g., a bunch of chimps who come upon food will probably become aggressive, whereas a bunch of bonobos will probably get frisky with each other.
They are closely related primates, and their level of intelligence is at least comparable. So it's quite unlikely that the chimps higher level of social aggression is a hard dependency of their level of intelligence.
I wonder if it's not more accurate to say predators tend to be evil, and predators are typically the ones who have to be more visably clever to get their food. Even a incredibly intelligent sheep will still just be eating plants. A incredibly intelligent crow though will be able to eat deer instead of insects.
Re matters of degree, I would disagree. The opposite of selfishness would be selflessness. This sounds like a good thing, eg being altruistic is assumed to be 'good', but then, it could also be about imposing one's values on someone, and devaluing the self. It could be a means of control (was forced altruism in communist countries 'good', for example). It seems that 'selflessness' - selfishness's opposite - can also be characterised as 'evil'. If it's not clear whether selfishness or selflessness is evil, it's not clear that it's a matter of degrees.
Ayn Rand argues in the "The Virtue of Selfishness" that selfishness is a good thing, if you want to see a lovely alternative argument.
I wonder how much of this is truly smart as in planned/intentional behaviour. Couldn’t it just evolve? Suppose you hang around something that you want to eat . And you make a lot of noise. So now predators show up. none of this was planned, but now you have a fitness advantage.
A) I am allergic to the word Just ;-) It means you stop being curious. How about one or more of the following?
B) Say you have a slow optimizer in a fast world: a lot of the time the optimal solution is going to be some form of computational generalization. Now you have meta-optimization. Life seems to enjoy doing this recursively.
C) Crow intelligence is clearly highly evolved, so you're technically correct, best kind of correct. Though here I'd argue that a very parsimonious answer is single-lifespan learned behavior. You're applying an existing learning system, no new mechanisms needed. (As opposed to positing some new evolved fixed action pattern).
D) There's not even anything stopping it from being planned behavior. Searle is struck out because it is biological; and no one can accuse us of anthropomorphism HERE!
E) Actually, for sparse events, planning using a world model can be more parsimonious. Apply existing model to new problem, again no extra mechanism needed. Which one works better for a particular entity in a particular situation depends on tradeoffs. (For a human example: see eg Memory items vs checklists vs airmanship in eg aviation)
F) That said, I'd even count evolution as a form of intelligence (well... it's an optimizer at least). I will literally die on this hill, and so will you O:-) (unless you represent optimums as valleys) ---> Plot evolution as a dynamic system in phase space, or with your typical hill-climber/gradient descent representations. How much does the trajectory differ from other optimizers? What happens if the 'terrain' is very bumpy with many local optimums? What if it deforms as you cross it?
I remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least crows, which the article was focusing on).
In other words, they seem to achieve better results with smaller brains than we thought. And yes, crows (in EU) do exhibit some pretty intelligent behavior.
The brains of corvids are not closely related to mammalian brains. All the mammals have roughly the same brain, but corvids have a different architecture.[1]
Intelligence seems to have evolved three times on this planet - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. Octopuses have a distributed system rather than one central brain.
They all have neurons, but the higher level architecture differs drastically.
Knowing that several different architectures can work is important for AI.
There's apparently more than one way to do it.
I appreciate the linked article. I wonder if the the list should be expanded to 'at least three times', and I start to think about intelligence in plants.
My point here is that if intelligence developed more than once, it didn't come from some one-time random event or divine intervention. It looks like once there are connected neurons, it evolves via continuous improvement.
In some environments, that evolution hits limits. Flying birds are limited in brain mass or they can't get airborne. Which may be why corvids don't rule the world.
Oh yes absolutely. Intelligence certainly developed more than once. Bird brain is no slur.
Before your comment I would have said it emerged twice, but then I had not considered octopuses, they are wicked smart and so unlike other intelligent animals we know.
I've read there's also a social aspect - crows are extremely social creatures, as are humans, and other highly intelligent animals like whales. That does seem to be a common denominator.
Regarding that, I'm reminded of another story - on my daily walk near work, there was a dead crow on the pavement. 5 or so crows were standing all around it, doing nothing really. Even me passing close by did not trigger them to fly away or anything, it seemed like they were standing watch on the body. The next day, it was still there, same thing. The 3rd day, it was gone, but the crows were still standing watch in the same manner. I didn't know what to make of it other than it appeared they were mourning or taking part in some type of ingroup ritual. I didn't see it again after that, but it struck me.
> [Social creatures] does seem to be a common denominator.
One theory is that it drives the creatures to internally model or simulate others intents and reactions, in a way which is a far more regular, consistent, and nuanced than any modeling of various prey or predators.
Further along that path is modeling future-me in plans, and layers of "I know they will know I know they know, so..."
Thanks for the link. I observed a flock of "mourning" crows around a dead one in the field behind my yard. I was flabbergasted at what I was seeing.
So they are mourning and investigating the cause of death for the sake of the flock. Wow!
Thanks for linking this, I had been wondering what the heck I had observed. It was really interesting. I love watching them. I almost always see something new (for me)
I'm not an expert in the area but have read a bunch on this topic to try and understand it better. Bird brains and human brains are structured very differently. Birds are much more like GPUs with independent distributed processing happening in parallel. Mammals have these big bidirectional layers where signals are constantly propagating up and down in a big connected computation.
It could simply be an evolutionary "discovery", with no particular advantage over our "brain model". Evolution doesn't seek out optima; it simply encourages genetic structures that improve odds of reproductive success.
Or, to put it another way: if corvid genetics happened upon a brain type that promoted their survival, it doesn't matter if it was "better" or "worse" than the path the monkey/hominid brains took. Genetics took the first bus going in that direction.
In terms of why bird brains would be exceptionally efficient for their volume (and I assume by extension, mass), would be that weight is at a premium for them.
Another case of brain efficiency : jumping spiders. They have less than half of ant's neurons, but instead of bruteforcing computing power they have a different specialized wirings.
tl;dr, the higher cognitive abilities of birds are centered in a different region of the brain compared to mammals, the pallium vs the cortex. Neuron density in the bird pallium is also higher than the comparable density in the mammalian cortex.
I've seen crows pick up walnuts and drop them in front of moving cars so the tires will open them. I had heard that they will do that, but it was still something to see it happen.
They plan pretty deeply - if you think about things like plastic lid snowboarding, or cup sorting games (fit the smaller cups inside the larger) and those types of puzzles, there's usually an abstract reward, whether it's fun, play, revenge, or some future food or whatnot. They tease other animals, will play fetch, demonstrate a rich emotional inner life, and all of those things can be motivations for their complex plans. Throw in familial loyalty, social dynamics, interactions with humans, and it's a recipe for glorious chaos. There's a lot more going on that doesn't cleanly map to most people's conception of birds.
I was talking with a neighbor once, and we had just started feeding the local crows. We were standing there for about 39 minutes, the I heard something metallic hit the sidewalk. I looked about 4 ft away, directly under the power lines, at a bottle cap. I hadn’t seen one of those in decades. Clearly it had been dropped by the crow perched up there.
Then, once we noticed a weird nut near the bowl of peanuts. Not sure what type it was, a buckeye I think.
Oddly, we’ve been feeding them for 6 years now and no other gifts!
I’ve nothing empirical to back this up, but it’s my understanding that shiny objects like bottle caps are prized toys, and the sort of thing one might be gifted by corvids who have taken a liking to you. I have heard plenty of anecdotal evidence that crows will exchange gifts with one another, and with humans, to develop and nurture positive relationships.
Someone pondered a correlation between intelligence and some notion of “evil”. I personally believe empathy and altruism are highly connected to intelligence, and the act of giving a gift to another is suggestive of both attributes.
There are also examples of altruism in other species not frequently considered intelligent. Vampire bats will regurgitate food to share with others, even if they are not tied by familial bonds and even if there’s no other tangential benefit to the individual giving up its own nutrition. We have also recently observed female tigers caring for and protecting another female’s cubs while she feeds, which is novel behavior to observe in typically solitary tigers.
Yea, what creeped me out, is this must have been done before, and got whatever effect the bird intended. hard to say what it’s motives were of course but they’re smart enough to know what they are doing
We have a rather large number of Blue Jays that frequent our backyard.
The smartest among them can weigh opportunity costs or count, or both.
Most of the jays will take two peanuts in the shell, go crack the shell open (sounds like they're cracking eggs in the trees, hilarious), cache the nuts (technically the seeds of the legume but anyway nuts from herein for brevity) and then take another unshelled one and fly away. Sometimes they crack open multiple shells and cache as many as they can before the final unshelled one.
The oldest of the jays, who is no longer alive, would regularly show up with so many cached nuts they could not take an unshelled nut. The cached nuts would get in the way.
They would occasionally drop a single peanut from their cache, because it meant they would be able to pick up an unshelled pair; that is they understood on some level the choice involved giving up some food because even more was contained in the shell.
Fascinating.
They, and one of their offspring who is still around, were the only jays that would do it. Though it's unclear if that's because they were "smarter" or simply because they trust us enough to take their time, whereas the other jays seem to act like they're stealing the nuts that belong to the two walking meat bags that live in the box and seem to leave their peanuts lying around.
We have two types jays that visit us. Scrub and Stellar. They come into the kitchen (door off the deck) to stand and sort through the bowl of peanuts in the shell. It’s hilarious to watch them go through them, finding the heaviest (?) ones, tossing the rejects to and fro. They’re completely unafraid of us. They are a great joy to watch.
Wonderful timing. Me and my daughter just started to feed and befriend a crow in our backyard. We started by putting out a few pieces of cat foot, shaking the plastic container and tapping on the table we put it on to signal to the crow we had put out food. Within only 2 days the crow has learned to come and swoop down for his meal within just a minute or two after he does his normal fly-by passes. Now only about 5 days in, and we have the crow coming right down to eat as we put out the food, not much of a care that we are there.
My daughter wants to start training it to bring trinkets or coins so that is probably next on the agenda.
One thing I didn’t not really account for is that now in the morning when I step outside our new friend really lays on the noises of excitement as he knows a meal is about to be served.
And the just released “Palaces of The Crow” by Ray Nayler. I just finished it — really moving but also a brutal read in parts (c.f. because of what humans will do to each other not crows)
> In Ray Nayler's speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl.
My bet is on Ravens, who live a long time, and the ancients among them get a white flight feathers in the wings which I have seen once, up close in a nieghbors yard who was closer with the critters than humans.
My fealing of ravens inteligence is based on there complex behaviors and one particular individual,who is bat shit insane, and makes the wildest strangest sounds and calls that are impossible to ignore for hours, but survives year to year, ie:dumb things never go crazy and or never survive there disfunctions.
ravens also fly upside down regularly, and have been filmed pranking wolves by pulling there tails, and there is strong evidence for ravens working as spotters and leading wolves to easy/injured prey that the ravens get to clean up after the kill
Australian Magpies are NOT corvid but Artamidae along with the butcherbird, but they are absolutely this intelligent.
They hold court over their juvelines and enforce behaviour, and they mourn the passing of members of the community.
I think it's possible the niche encourages large brains. A bit of nature not nurture maybe.
They are tool users. And they can teach offspring lessons learned from humans, and recognize friend and foe. Well mostly: cyclists are routinely mis-cast as foe no matter what. This is why Australian cyclists look like demented wheelie porcupines: cable ties on the helmet keep the eye-peckers at bay.
Love our magpies, we’ve been interacting with the local family for several years now and they trust us pretty well.
Last year during fledging season their baby was near the side of the road, in the grass looking lost/hurt/exhausted, so some kind but misguided passers-by (it’s normal, they kick ‘em out of the nest to try and make them fly) picked it up and were going to take it to a wildlife hospital. Mum was watching them from a tree, quite distressed.
I persuaded them I’d look after it and get help if needed, and took the baby back up to the house, then sat down outside and tried to give it back. Baby was by this point clutching my hand and nestling in to me. Mum wandered up, took a look at me holding her kid and I could almost imagine her saying “Ah, yeah you look after him for a while then, I need a break” because she seemed to relax, then went back to the other adults and had a feed before coming back for him!
I feed crows during winter in my local park. They recognize me as soon as I enter and follow me around. Some even fly very close above my head and tap me with a wing.
Also they cache food they don't eat, they hide it, cover with leaves and make sure nobody is watching them, they act very casual. I am not sure if they remember the locations though.
Compared to ravens they have smaller head but I believe it is because they spend so much time near people (at least here in Europe you don't see ravens in cities, they are afraid,for historical reasons, of people and low in numbers) they get smarter and more crafty.
Thanks to Merlin Bird ID, I've got rather into birds in the past few years. We have a robin and blackbird that hang out in the garden with us, seemingly unafraid. A couple of months back I bought a camera feeder [0] but we've still only had three bird types that visit - a coal tit who comes fairly infrequently but moves so fast the camera could easily be missing him, some amazing jackdaws who seem to take turns on the feeder, and some Eurasian magpies who are absolute fucking arseholes. I made the mistake of putting a mealworm / seed mix in the feeder once, and the mealworms were so prized by the magpies that they worked out how to empty it completely within minutes of me filling it, throwing all the seed that they weren't interested in on the floor. I've stopped putting mealworms in it now, but now they empty it just to make sure there's none in there. I'm going to have to take it down and try to fashion some kind of grate to make it much harder to get the seeds out.
[0] https://naturespy.org - not the best resolution, but plenty good enough for up close video of the birds. I did a fair bit of research and loved the fact that these guys are a social enterprise who put their profits back into conservation projects. Highly recommended.
Oh, and my other favourite corvid story - there's a guy that walks three very old dogs in my local park and he occasionally throws tiny treats down for them as they walk around. Crows started following him around the park for the treats the dogs missed, so then he started feeding them to the crows too, and now he walks slowly around the park with 3 old dogs and about 5 crows ambling along with him all in a fairly tight little group. I love crows.
Yes, magpies are very intelligent birds. Also very annoying! I don't like hearing their "cackling", especially if you're in bed trying to sleep. Magpies at mine also figured out how to feed from the wire-cylinder hanging feeder, meant for small birds. They flap their wings like crazy to hover for a few moments at the feeder and knock out the food or get to it. Clever birds. The pigeons just stand around below and scavenge ...
Magpies certainly have a different temperament from crows. I tried to feed a local crow a few years ago, and while it was busy acting confused (you're giving this to me? Seriously?) a magpie swooped in for the treat.
These days I'm on good terms with both. The magpies are easily bullied away by the crows, and I've learned the distinctly unfriendly noise they make when a crow comes close (three rapid, sharp chatters). I think they have a sound for me as well, a rising chi-chik very quietly. Probably to avoid announcing the arrival of the food guy to the crows.
I believe that canonically the tunnel painting is made by the coyote, the problem is that because it's a cartoon the bird can run into the non-existent tunnel anyway and the coyote cannot because that's funnier.
It is interesting that e.g. "Coyote time" was copied into platform games but in real life if you're not stood on solid ground you fall immediately 'cos Mother Nature doesn't give a shit what's more fun.
How is it so different from, I don't know, directly grabbing it and tearing it apart? There are only so many ways they have to kill something (or injure it enough to allow killing it).
A lot of crow hunting stories feel cruel to read about, though I wonder why that is.
There is something about intelligence that seems to carry a degree of... moral responsibility, somehow? Though in reality it's just an animal eating another animal, as ever.
Maybe something like this: Most animals hunt in a way that minimizes their odds of getting hurt, to the best of their ability. Crows are pretty smart, and not very strong in the grand scheme of things. So they engage in tactics that look like cruel manipulative pranks; causing the prey to somehow kill itself or get killed by something stronger.
In the end, I think a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck and say “Ah well, got me fair and square!”
> a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck
I know this is tangential to your point, but lions don't really hunt that way. They ambush, as they could never outrun a gazelle, and then they don't snap its neck unless unintentionally. They tend to just start eating it while it is still alive. It's quite brutal to watch.
Humans used to hunt animals by chasing them into pits and then punching holes into them with sticks until they bled out not to mention the many kinds of horrible traps for smaller prey animals.
Humane hunting is mostly something that only a rich old guy with his night vision goggles and sniper rifle can afford.
Even for farm animals, many cultures perform their sacrifice in ghastly ways.
In my part of the world there's a cuckoo that pulls a heist on crows where the male makes annoying noises and the crows chase him off while the female cuckoo invades the nest and leaves an egg. When the egg hatches the bird inside looks nothing like a crow but the crow mama never catches on and pays child support until it's grown.
There was a video on youtube about a crow coming to a human and making that sound, also in winter with snow; commenters agreed that it was probably thirsty and was imitating running water that way to get the human to give it water. The human in the video didn't get that. But here in the end we can see the crow eating snow, which may confirm that it is really a way for crows tell when they are thirsty? Not sure what that has to do with the owl--"teasing" might be just testing the owl's capabilities for checking whether killing the owl to drink its blood would be an option? (I guess melting snow for water is increasing the risk for the crow to be cold & run out of energy.)
> Not sure what that has to do with the owl--"teasing"
I wonder if they're just amusing themselves (by being little jerks.)
One day in early spring, I thought I heard a Red Tail Hawk screeching in a tree directly above me. I stood back, searching for it. I never spotted it despite the leaves barely out on the tree. But I did spot a Blue Jay hopping around some lower branches.
When I got home I looked up Blue Jay behavior and found that they do imitate the calls of Red Tail Hawks, among others.
Once as a kid I was at my cousin’s ranch outside of Waxahachie Texas. I was sitting on the steps to his house eating a sandwich when a crow landed about 10 feet away and hopped right up to me. I gave it some of my sandwich and it just flew off. It was very strange, it didn’t seem to fear me at all and just wanted a bite. I told my aunt and she was shocked and not aware of any tame crows at all.
I really like crows and magpies. Crows especially do little hops when they run around and it always makes me smile. I've wanted to make friends with the ones around me for a while but I haven't yet
Humans are allowed to just change their names. It's not very common, especially in academics because your name is attached to your reputation, but it's not forbidden or even especially unusual. [And of course in several important cultures women are expected to change their name when they marry, although this seems like a terrible idea to me and in general I recommend against it]
So it is entirely possible that they went "I think I will take the name Crow White, that's hilarious" and a PhD later they're a professor running research on corvids.
Edited to add mention of cultural convention to change names on marriage.
Equipping cats and dogs with talking buttons (see, for example, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBh-BXgsO9IjhN-thTLvm... or https://www.youtube.com/@floundercat) has shown me there is a lot more going in their little heads than I suspected. There are examples of cats describing their dreams, or worrying about what will happen in the future, or theorizing about the nature of the world (in a very naive way).
Birds have higher neural density than mammals (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113) so can pack a lot into their tiny heads. I do wonder what they'd have to say, if given the chance.
I started doing this with my cat. It's easy to try to explain away the underlying thought processes as coincidental association, and some of that is certainly true, but experiencing it first hand with a cat you know well is certainly different. My cat presses a button for his name when he wants attentions, buttons for outside, food, water. A button for YouTube (the startup sound), since he likes watching other cats and critter videos and nature documentaries on there. I was working in the other room during a stormy day and he was watching some nature video when I heard him repeatedly pressing the YouTube button and his name. But he was already watching it? When I went out there, I saw there was a video playing with a cat that looked almost exactly like him on the screen. He seemed extremely interested. Did he think it was him? Or was he just calling attention that it looked like him and wanted to tell me? Either way, never saw that behavior before or after.
I would be wary of extrapolating too much from the talking buttons. Review the clever hans effect and (the critiques of) Koko the gorilla for examples of people misattributing classical conditioning for intentionality.
The fact is that humans are exceedingly quick to find patterns in random data (e.g. horescopes, any form of divination), and that tendency gets amplified when the opportunity to anthropomorphize a cute animal is presented.
I live next to a farm in a rural town. We have lots of cats around which are necessary to keep the rodents in check. Our cats love to play their prey to death in our yard (yeah nature is cruel). Some of the local crows know how to get the dead mice from the cats. One or two crows distract the cat, the cat likes to chase the crows for the thrill of the hunt, and then one crow swoops in and steals the cats prey. The cats are always bamboozled when this happens and we watch and laugh. Really smart these feathered freaks :D
I leave shelled peanuts and other bird feed out in the winter, and is fascinating to watch the crows and magpies to crack them open, feed on some of them, then grab two shelled peanuts and fly off with them. They already recognize me coming out in the winter mornings with the bird feed and peanut bags. They wait patiently in the surrounding trees until I'm in the house again. They even see me through the windows watching them and only come down to feed once I am out of sight for them. Truly remarkable.
We also have some pairs of red kites in our area which circle over our fields for prey. The crows don't like them and will try to chase them away, mostly in packs of two to three crows. They are 99% successful in chasing the red kites away because they are more agile in the air and can do more complex flight manouvers. But once one of the crows got to close to the claws of the kite and was killed instantly and dropped down dead. What happened then was even more fascinating. The whole flock of crows gathered around their dead companion and maybe "mourned"? I don't know how to else explain it.
Next winter I will try to befriend them even more, they are so fascinating!
I've heard the crow "funeral" is an information gathering strategy. Figuring out what killed it, what risks are in the area, how to mitigate it happening again.
Very clever!
The irony of a group of crows being called a murder while they are gathered for a funeral, going over their own post mortem of a fallen comrade.
Anecdata: I see this in the park next to my house. Two crows will repeatedly chase and tail-pull an Egyptian goose that has no food and nothing they could want. Hard to read it as anything other than play, which lines up with documented corvid tail-pulling of eagles, cats, etc.
Thank you for sharing these wonderful stories!
One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something.
It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the sidewalk, a pretty sizable rock smacked the pavement next to me, seemingly out of nowhere. If it had hit my head I would have been hurt. I finally look up and see a big crow staring directly down at me - it had dropped it from the power lines, it had seemingly been intentional, maybe as a warning, I don't know. I attributed it to malice towards the vagrants that harass them.
I was amazed at how much intelligence it would take to 1) form a grudge 2) form intent to threaten/harm, 3) formulate a plan using a weapon with cause -> effect to execute intent, 4) wait for opportunity.
I have observed a lot of very intelligent behaviors from these birds but that was the wildest one. I have seen it happen once since, so I'm convinced it isn't an accident.
Crows in country will wait for a newborn deer to be left alone in a field by their mothers shortly after birth to peck the baby's eyes out so it dies and the crow can eat it later. My neighbor had told me about this happening, and maybe a month later I saw a fawn with its eyes pecked out shortly after it had died. The doe just sat at the edge of the field by it all night. So sad, but really smart of the crows.
Crows have also been known to alert predators like wolves to easy prey so they can pick the remains.
They also do this to lambs, they're smart but evil
> smart but evil
Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.
the evil here seems to be being a predator, which for the doe it would be reasonable to say the predator is evil, but examining the natural order of things from outside, as a human observing the doe, the fawn, and the crows, that is a pretty weird judgement to make. The predator has evolved to eat the prey, if that is evil then nature is evil or if you like, whatever created nature.
'Evil' is a human characterisation, and is not applicable to animals imo; to apply it is to anthropomorphise the animal.
An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
The longer I live the more evidence I see the barrier between humans and other animals is thinner than we would like to imagine.
So I counter you with a practical question: can a crow commit a social transgression that will result in punishment by other crows? My strong suspicion is that the answer is yes, though I would love documentation as it would suggest a crow-cultural definition of morality
I agree. But I don't think pecking the eyes of a deer, thereby providing all the crows food, would be considered 'evil'/'bad' by other crows. I think crows would acclaim the action as 'good'/'right'.
We have rescue dog (abandoned on the street) and it seems to have a notion that violence within family is bad.
I was quite surprised to see that when I mock threatened my wife with a broom in his presence he jumped in to block. Not only that, he took the broom away from me and secured it away. I initially thought it was play, that he wanted to play with the broom. Seems he was just interested in separating me from the broom. He is our household saint.
We have a much younger dog (another rescue) who is not very nice at all to our saint. However, if my body language has even a hint of a threat to our little devil, he sure gets perked up and ready to protect.
This probably comes from pack behavior instinct. Fights inside a pack is bad.
Nice story. I believe that dogs are capable of moral judgements too. The idea of 'evil' is a human idea though.
I suspect the corvids aren't obligate carnivores and so they could choose not to eat animals but they do it anyway.
Given that humans aren't obligate carnivores and further more, are capable of advanced chemistry so that even if they were obliged to eat other animals biologically they could just work around this without needing to kill anything - it seems much more compelling to judge us by such a metric than them. We decided that we liked steak so much we would deliberately raise cows just to eat them, the crow can't be anywhere near that "evil" if that's how we're characterising this outcome.
They're scavengers, I think scavengers are wired to eat whatever is available at the least expenditure of energy.
I'd say the evil lies in the infliction of suffering, not the killing or eating.
I glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment.
Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.
I think evil is an an artificial and subjective construct and therefore intelligence will somehow do something “evil” by someone’s or something’s standard.
But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.
As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.
And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).
So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.
> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
No.
E.g., a bunch of chimps who come upon food will probably become aggressive, whereas a bunch of bonobos will probably get frisky with each other.
They are closely related primates, and their level of intelligence is at least comparable. So it's quite unlikely that the chimps higher level of social aggression is a hard dependency of their level of intelligence.
Bonobos commit strategic infanticide amongst competing tribes.
I wonder if it's not more accurate to say predators tend to be evil, and predators are typically the ones who have to be more visably clever to get their food. Even a incredibly intelligent sheep will still just be eating plants. A incredibly intelligent crow though will be able to eat deer instead of insects.
> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
You think 'selfishness' and 'evil' are equivalent?
Matters of degree, no?
But that was poorly punctuated I meant selfishness or even evil not that they were equivalent.
Thanks for clarifying.
Re matters of degree, I would disagree. The opposite of selfishness would be selflessness. This sounds like a good thing, eg being altruistic is assumed to be 'good', but then, it could also be about imposing one's values on someone, and devaluing the self. It could be a means of control (was forced altruism in communist countries 'good', for example). It seems that 'selflessness' - selfishness's opposite - can also be characterised as 'evil'. If it's not clear whether selfishness or selflessness is evil, it's not clear that it's a matter of degrees.
Ayn Rand argues in the "The Virtue of Selfishness" that selfishness is a good thing, if you want to see a lovely alternative argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3URpIKFoyW0
Speak for yourself.
I don't think they said you hadn't seen any such evidence.
I meant about being either evil or stupid. Never mind.
A goose was protecting its young as some (crows/ravens/idk) hopped around close on the ground. Mama hissed and flapped a little. Crows back off a bit.
Meanwhile another crow flies in, picks up a gosling by the neck (i swear there wasn't much difference in size, unreal to see) and flies off with it.
I could see the whole thing coming, was remarkable.
I wonder how much of this is truly smart as in planned/intentional behaviour. Couldn’t it just evolve? Suppose you hang around something that you want to eat . And you make a lot of noise. So now predators show up. none of this was planned, but now you have a fitness advantage.
A) I am allergic to the word Just ;-) It means you stop being curious. How about one or more of the following?
B) Say you have a slow optimizer in a fast world: a lot of the time the optimal solution is going to be some form of computational generalization. Now you have meta-optimization. Life seems to enjoy doing this recursively.
C) Crow intelligence is clearly highly evolved, so you're technically correct, best kind of correct. Though here I'd argue that a very parsimonious answer is single-lifespan learned behavior. You're applying an existing learning system, no new mechanisms needed. (As opposed to positing some new evolved fixed action pattern).
D) There's not even anything stopping it from being planned behavior. Searle is struck out because it is biological; and no one can accuse us of anthropomorphism HERE!
E) Actually, for sparse events, planning using a world model can be more parsimonious. Apply existing model to new problem, again no extra mechanism needed. Which one works better for a particular entity in a particular situation depends on tradeoffs. (For a human example: see eg Memory items vs checklists vs airmanship in eg aviation)
F) That said, I'd even count evolution as a form of intelligence (well... it's an optimizer at least). I will literally die on this hill, and so will you O:-) (unless you represent optimums as valleys) ---> Plot evolution as a dynamic system in phase space, or with your typical hill-climber/gradient descent representations. How much does the trajectory differ from other optimizers? What happens if the 'terrain' is very bumpy with many local optimums? What if it deforms as you cross it?
I thought what was a myth. My wife is terrified of crows, always thinking they're abut to peck her eyes out.
second degree planning involving third party means very high social modeling, fascinating
I remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least crows, which the article was focusing on).
In other words, they seem to achieve better results with smaller brains than we thought. And yes, crows (in EU) do exhibit some pretty intelligent behavior.
The brains of corvids are not closely related to mammalian brains. All the mammals have roughly the same brain, but corvids have a different architecture.[1]
Intelligence seems to have evolved three times on this planet - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. Octopuses have a distributed system rather than one central brain. They all have neurons, but the higher level architecture differs drastically.
Knowing that several different architectures can work is important for AI. There's apparently more than one way to do it.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...
Where do parrots fall in this grouping? They're not corvids. There must have been a pre-corvid ancestor.
Parrots aren't evil, they're just assholes.
I appreciate the linked article. I wonder if the the list should be expanded to 'at least three times', and I start to think about intelligence in plants.
See also recent work on honeybees, popularized here https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bumblebees-can-sol...
honeybees are not social insects, but maybe social insects should be added to the list?
Social insects. The original object oriented programming paradigm.
Octopuses are probably more alien than others.
My point here is that if intelligence developed more than once, it didn't come from some one-time random event or divine intervention. It looks like once there are connected neurons, it evolves via continuous improvement.
In some environments, that evolution hits limits. Flying birds are limited in brain mass or they can't get airborne. Which may be why corvids don't rule the world.
Oh yes absolutely. Intelligence certainly developed more than once. Bird brain is no slur.
Before your comment I would have said it emerged twice, but then I had not considered octopuses, they are wicked smart and so unlike other intelligent animals we know.
I've read there's also a social aspect - crows are extremely social creatures, as are humans, and other highly intelligent animals like whales. That does seem to be a common denominator.
Regarding that, I'm reminded of another story - on my daily walk near work, there was a dead crow on the pavement. 5 or so crows were standing all around it, doing nothing really. Even me passing close by did not trigger them to fly away or anything, it seemed like they were standing watch on the body. The next day, it was still there, same thing. The 3rd day, it was gone, but the crows were still standing watch in the same manner. I didn't know what to make of it other than it appeared they were mourning or taking part in some type of ingroup ritual. I didn't see it again after that, but it struck me.
> [Social creatures] does seem to be a common denominator.
One theory is that it drives the creatures to internally model or simulate others intents and reactions, in a way which is a far more regular, consistent, and nuanced than any modeling of various prey or predators.
Further along that path is modeling future-me in plans, and layers of "I know they will know I know they know, so..."
Corvids have been known to investigate deaths, truly fascinating creatures!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...
Thanks for the link. I observed a flock of "mourning" crows around a dead one in the field behind my yard. I was flabbergasted at what I was seeing. So they are mourning and investigating the cause of death for the sake of the flock. Wow!
Thanks for linking this, I had been wondering what the heck I had observed. It was really interesting. I love watching them. I almost always see something new (for me)
I'm not an expert in the area but have read a bunch on this topic to try and understand it better. Bird brains and human brains are structured very differently. Birds are much more like GPUs with independent distributed processing happening in parallel. Mammals have these big bidirectional layers where signals are constantly propagating up and down in a big connected computation.
I wonder what the energy/evolutionary cost of densely-connected brains is. If it's advantageous, why are crows exceptional?
It could simply be an evolutionary "discovery", with no particular advantage over our "brain model". Evolution doesn't seek out optima; it simply encourages genetic structures that improve odds of reproductive success.
Or, to put it another way: if corvid genetics happened upon a brain type that promoted their survival, it doesn't matter if it was "better" or "worse" than the path the monkey/hominid brains took. Genetics took the first bus going in that direction.
In terms of why bird brains would be exceptionally efficient for their volume (and I assume by extension, mass), would be that weight is at a premium for them.
Maybe they require the equivalent of advanced EUV machines to make?
Another case of brain efficiency : jumping spiders. They have less than half of ant's neurons, but instead of bruteforcing computing power they have a different specialized wirings.
This might be what that article referred to [0]?
tl;dr, the higher cognitive abilities of birds are centered in a different region of the brain compared to mammals, the pallium vs the cortex. Neuron density in the bird pallium is also higher than the comparable density in the mammalian cortex.
[0] Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5182
They're even apparently able to pass their grudges along to other crows who did not have first-hand experience with the subject of the grudge.
Here is that paper. It's amazing.
https://www.aaas.org/membership/member-spotlight/scientist-j...
I've seen crows pick up walnuts and drop them in front of moving cars so the tires will open them. I had heard that they will do that, but it was still something to see it happen.
They plan pretty deeply - if you think about things like plastic lid snowboarding, or cup sorting games (fit the smaller cups inside the larger) and those types of puzzles, there's usually an abstract reward, whether it's fun, play, revenge, or some future food or whatnot. They tease other animals, will play fetch, demonstrate a rich emotional inner life, and all of those things can be motivations for their complex plans. Throw in familial loyalty, social dynamics, interactions with humans, and it's a recipe for glorious chaos. There's a lot more going on that doesn't cleanly map to most people's conception of birds.
Ravens are wonderful creatures.
> ... glorious chaos. I like that concept. Thanks for the laugh! :D
I was talking with a neighbor once, and we had just started feeding the local crows. We were standing there for about 39 minutes, the I heard something metallic hit the sidewalk. I looked about 4 ft away, directly under the power lines, at a bottle cap. I hadn’t seen one of those in decades. Clearly it had been dropped by the crow perched up there.
Then, once we noticed a weird nut near the bowl of peanuts. Not sure what type it was, a buckeye I think.
Oddly, we’ve been feeding them for 6 years now and no other gifts!
I’ve nothing empirical to back this up, but it’s my understanding that shiny objects like bottle caps are prized toys, and the sort of thing one might be gifted by corvids who have taken a liking to you. I have heard plenty of anecdotal evidence that crows will exchange gifts with one another, and with humans, to develop and nurture positive relationships.
Someone pondered a correlation between intelligence and some notion of “evil”. I personally believe empathy and altruism are highly connected to intelligence, and the act of giving a gift to another is suggestive of both attributes.
There are also examples of altruism in other species not frequently considered intelligent. Vampire bats will regurgitate food to share with others, even if they are not tied by familial bonds and even if there’s no other tangential benefit to the individual giving up its own nutrition. We have also recently observed female tigers caring for and protecting another female’s cubs while she feeds, which is novel behavior to observe in typically solitary tigers.
Oh, crows are WAY smarter than that. If one tried to drop a stone on you, it was because it didn't like your online comments.
Maybe you should be asking yourself what you did to piss of this corvid? They have been shown to recognize faces.
By "sizable rock" do you mean large pebble or small boulder?
A large pebble the size of a small pebble
A little larger than a golf ball.
Something that produces a loud exclamation in a movie character, but possible permanent brain damage IRL.
Yea, what creeped me out, is this must have been done before, and got whatever effect the bird intended. hard to say what it’s motives were of course but they’re smart enough to know what they are doing
[dead]
Where I am from, a rock is by definition huge. It sounds like the bird dropped a stone.
If the stone the crow dropped weighed a stone, that's a big fuckin' rock where I come from.
Not to mention a big fuckin' bird.
My understanding is crows can recognize individuals, so I would think back to what you did to piss off that crow, or that crow's friends.
As demonstrated in humans, the ability to recognize individuals is little impediment to resentment based on group membership.
I was guessing just a general preference towards anyone in their area. I have certainly never done anything harmful towards them.
Crows have been known to harass distinct individuals over others, even going as far as to teach other crows about this person.
I wonder if this was an elder crow whose eyesight has decreased with age and gave out the wrong descriptions to their friends. :D
We have a rather large number of Blue Jays that frequent our backyard.
The smartest among them can weigh opportunity costs or count, or both.
Most of the jays will take two peanuts in the shell, go crack the shell open (sounds like they're cracking eggs in the trees, hilarious), cache the nuts (technically the seeds of the legume but anyway nuts from herein for brevity) and then take another unshelled one and fly away. Sometimes they crack open multiple shells and cache as many as they can before the final unshelled one.
The oldest of the jays, who is no longer alive, would regularly show up with so many cached nuts they could not take an unshelled nut. The cached nuts would get in the way.
They would occasionally drop a single peanut from their cache, because it meant they would be able to pick up an unshelled pair; that is they understood on some level the choice involved giving up some food because even more was contained in the shell.
Fascinating.
They, and one of their offspring who is still around, were the only jays that would do it. Though it's unclear if that's because they were "smarter" or simply because they trust us enough to take their time, whereas the other jays seem to act like they're stealing the nuts that belong to the two walking meat bags that live in the box and seem to leave their peanuts lying around.
We have two types jays that visit us. Scrub and Stellar. They come into the kitchen (door off the deck) to stand and sort through the bowl of peanuts in the shell. It’s hilarious to watch them go through them, finding the heaviest (?) ones, tossing the rejects to and fro. They’re completely unafraid of us. They are a great joy to watch.
Wonderful timing. Me and my daughter just started to feed and befriend a crow in our backyard. We started by putting out a few pieces of cat foot, shaking the plastic container and tapping on the table we put it on to signal to the crow we had put out food. Within only 2 days the crow has learned to come and swoop down for his meal within just a minute or two after he does his normal fly-by passes. Now only about 5 days in, and we have the crow coming right down to eat as we put out the food, not much of a care that we are there. My daughter wants to start training it to bring trinkets or coins so that is probably next on the agenda.
One thing I didn’t not really account for is that now in the morning when I step outside our new friend really lays on the noises of excitement as he knows a meal is about to be served.
I have been working on this as well and have a crowbuddy who enjoys what I feed him. I want him to do more, but haven't gotten him to yet.
A couple years ago I was doing this and they brought me a chicken head as a gift. Thanks... I guess?
Meanwhile, 40,000 years ago: "Me and my daughter just started to feed and befriend a wolf skulking near our camp."
I'm hoping that is a typo for cat food, instead of training your cattle on horrifically scavenged body parts.
> My daughter wants to start training it to bring trinkets or coins so that is probably next on the agenda.
Coins? Screw that. Go right to bills.
bills are fragile, bitcoin might be better long-term.
Working on training my crowbuddy so that he bites the gold coins and only brings real ones, was getting too much iron pyrite
If you like the idea of smart corvids, Adrian Tchaikovsky's scifi novel "The Children of Memory" is a fun read.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60850767-children-of-...
And the just released “Palaces of The Crow” by Ray Nayler. I just finished it — really moving but also a brutal read in parts (c.f. because of what humans will do to each other not crows)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241392678
> In Ray Nayler's speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl.
My bet is on Ravens, who live a long time, and the ancients among them get a white flight feathers in the wings which I have seen once, up close in a nieghbors yard who was closer with the critters than humans. My fealing of ravens inteligence is based on there complex behaviors and one particular individual,who is bat shit insane, and makes the wildest strangest sounds and calls that are impossible to ignore for hours, but survives year to year, ie:dumb things never go crazy and or never survive there disfunctions. ravens also fly upside down regularly, and have been filmed pranking wolves by pulling there tails, and there is strong evidence for ravens working as spotters and leading wolves to easy/injured prey that the ravens get to clean up after the kill
Australian Magpies are NOT corvid but Artamidae along with the butcherbird, but they are absolutely this intelligent.
They hold court over their juvelines and enforce behaviour, and they mourn the passing of members of the community.
I think it's possible the niche encourages large brains. A bit of nature not nurture maybe.
They are tool users. And they can teach offspring lessons learned from humans, and recognize friend and foe. Well mostly: cyclists are routinely mis-cast as foe no matter what. This is why Australian cyclists look like demented wheelie porcupines: cable ties on the helmet keep the eye-peckers at bay.
Love our magpies, we’ve been interacting with the local family for several years now and they trust us pretty well.
Last year during fledging season their baby was near the side of the road, in the grass looking lost/hurt/exhausted, so some kind but misguided passers-by (it’s normal, they kick ‘em out of the nest to try and make them fly) picked it up and were going to take it to a wildlife hospital. Mum was watching them from a tree, quite distressed.
I persuaded them I’d look after it and get help if needed, and took the baby back up to the house, then sat down outside and tried to give it back. Baby was by this point clutching my hand and nestling in to me. Mum wandered up, took a look at me holding her kid and I could almost imagine her saying “Ah, yeah you look after him for a while then, I need a break” because she seemed to relax, then went back to the other adults and had a feed before coming back for him!
I feed crows during winter in my local park. They recognize me as soon as I enter and follow me around. Some even fly very close above my head and tap me with a wing.
Also they cache food they don't eat, they hide it, cover with leaves and make sure nobody is watching them, they act very casual. I am not sure if they remember the locations though.
Compared to ravens they have smaller head but I believe it is because they spend so much time near people (at least here in Europe you don't see ravens in cities, they are afraid,for historical reasons, of people and low in numbers) they get smarter and more crafty.
I can recommend a great book about corvids with beautiful illustrations: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300122558/in-the-company...
Thanks to Merlin Bird ID, I've got rather into birds in the past few years. We have a robin and blackbird that hang out in the garden with us, seemingly unafraid. A couple of months back I bought a camera feeder [0] but we've still only had three bird types that visit - a coal tit who comes fairly infrequently but moves so fast the camera could easily be missing him, some amazing jackdaws who seem to take turns on the feeder, and some Eurasian magpies who are absolute fucking arseholes. I made the mistake of putting a mealworm / seed mix in the feeder once, and the mealworms were so prized by the magpies that they worked out how to empty it completely within minutes of me filling it, throwing all the seed that they weren't interested in on the floor. I've stopped putting mealworms in it now, but now they empty it just to make sure there's none in there. I'm going to have to take it down and try to fashion some kind of grate to make it much harder to get the seeds out.
[0] https://naturespy.org - not the best resolution, but plenty good enough for up close video of the birds. I did a fair bit of research and loved the fact that these guys are a social enterprise who put their profits back into conservation projects. Highly recommended.
Oh, and my other favourite corvid story - there's a guy that walks three very old dogs in my local park and he occasionally throws tiny treats down for them as they walk around. Crows started following him around the park for the treats the dogs missed, so then he started feeding them to the crows too, and now he walks slowly around the park with 3 old dogs and about 5 crows ambling along with him all in a fairly tight little group. I love crows.
Yes, magpies are very intelligent birds. Also very annoying! I don't like hearing their "cackling", especially if you're in bed trying to sleep. Magpies at mine also figured out how to feed from the wire-cylinder hanging feeder, meant for small birds. They flap their wings like crazy to hover for a few moments at the feeder and knock out the food or get to it. Clever birds. The pigeons just stand around below and scavenge ...
Magpies certainly have a different temperament from crows. I tried to feed a local crow a few years ago, and while it was busy acting confused (you're giving this to me? Seriously?) a magpie swooped in for the treat. These days I'm on good terms with both. The magpies are easily bullied away by the crows, and I've learned the distinctly unfriendly noise they make when a crow comes close (three rapid, sharp chatters). I think they have a sound for me as well, a rising chi-chik very quietly. Probably to avoid announcing the arrival of the food guy to the crows.
Chasing a bird of lesser intelligence so that it slams into an office building window seems especially cruel.
Birds chase coyotes so they slam into the sides of cliff walls, sometimes even painting a fake tunnel to fool the coyote.
I believe that canonically the tunnel painting is made by the coyote, the problem is that because it's a cartoon the bird can run into the non-existent tunnel anyway and the coyote cannot because that's funnier.
It is interesting that e.g. "Coyote time" was copied into platform games but in real life if you're not stood on solid ground you fall immediately 'cos Mother Nature doesn't give a shit what's more fun.
Mother Nature isn't in charge of gravity. That's Papa Physics' job.
>Birds chase coyotes
Does the bird ever even acknowledges the coyote?
It does beep at it.
How is it so different from, I don't know, directly grabbing it and tearing it apart? There are only so many ways they have to kill something (or injure it enough to allow killing it).
It definitely seems brutal, but when I stop and think about it it's actually probably more humane for the prey than getting eaten alive, right?
A lot of crow hunting stories feel cruel to read about, though I wonder why that is.
There is something about intelligence that seems to carry a degree of... moral responsibility, somehow? Though in reality it's just an animal eating another animal, as ever.
Maybe something like this: Most animals hunt in a way that minimizes their odds of getting hurt, to the best of their ability. Crows are pretty smart, and not very strong in the grand scheme of things. So they engage in tactics that look like cruel manipulative pranks; causing the prey to somehow kill itself or get killed by something stronger.
In the end, I think a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck and say “Ah well, got me fair and square!”
> a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck
I know this is tangential to your point, but lions don't really hunt that way. They ambush, as they could never outrun a gazelle, and then they don't snap its neck unless unintentionally. They tend to just start eating it while it is still alive. It's quite brutal to watch.
Humans used to hunt animals by chasing them into pits and then punching holes into them with sticks until they bled out not to mention the many kinds of horrible traps for smaller prey animals.
Humane hunting is mostly something that only a rich old guy with his night vision goggles and sniper rifle can afford.
Even for farm animals, many cultures perform their sacrifice in ghastly ways.
In my part of the world there's a cuckoo that pulls a heist on crows where the male makes annoying noises and the crows chase him off while the female cuckoo invades the nest and leaves an egg. When the egg hatches the bird inside looks nothing like a crow but the crow mama never catches on and pays child support until it's grown.
That cuckoo gets my vote for cleverest.
What part of the world is that? I don't think European cuckoos target birds as large as crows, or even magpies.
SE Asia
I've never seen any corvid use React, so they must be pretty smart indeed.
https://imgur.com/anon-starts-world-war-crow-K63U5ig
Here is one playing ball: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QqLU-o7N7Kw
This one is feeding a dog: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q7Z0yZhyz0s
Teasing an owl: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0i9tjnW7r0
> Teasing an owl: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0i9tjnW7r0
There was a video on youtube about a crow coming to a human and making that sound, also in winter with snow; commenters agreed that it was probably thirsty and was imitating running water that way to get the human to give it water. The human in the video didn't get that. But here in the end we can see the crow eating snow, which may confirm that it is really a way for crows tell when they are thirsty? Not sure what that has to do with the owl--"teasing" might be just testing the owl's capabilities for checking whether killing the owl to drink its blood would be an option? (I guess melting snow for water is increasing the risk for the crow to be cold & run out of energy.)
> Not sure what that has to do with the owl--"teasing"
I wonder if they're just amusing themselves (by being little jerks.)
One day in early spring, I thought I heard a Red Tail Hawk screeching in a tree directly above me. I stood back, searching for it. I never spotted it despite the leaves barely out on the tree. But I did spot a Blue Jay hopping around some lower branches.
When I got home I looked up Blue Jay behavior and found that they do imitate the calls of Red Tail Hawks, among others.
I like this one:
>Crow skiing down a roof
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WupH8oyrAo
This one seems smarter than an average dog.
Once as a kid I was at my cousin’s ranch outside of Waxahachie Texas. I was sitting on the steps to his house eating a sandwich when a crow landed about 10 feet away and hopped right up to me. I gave it some of my sandwich and it just flew off. It was very strange, it didn’t seem to fear me at all and just wanted a bite. I told my aunt and she was shocked and not aware of any tame crows at all.
I really recommend reading "Ravens in Winter" by Bernd Heinrich https://jake-reich.co.uk/blog/17
I still can't enter a corvid thread without looking for some Unidan copypasta.
The jackdaw is the smartest corvid because it ragebaits people on the internet
I really like crows and magpies. Crows especially do little hops when they run around and it always makes me smile. I've wanted to make friends with the ones around me for a while but I haven't yet
Did anyone else first read "the smartest COVID"?
Only far enough to know that the article is a bunch of short anecdotes.
HN's comments include quite a few longer & better ones.
> At least five such cases involved biologists: in Montana, Crow White ...
Crow White is a hell of a name. Bravo to their parents.
Humans are allowed to just change their names. It's not very common, especially in academics because your name is attached to your reputation, but it's not forbidden or even especially unusual. [And of course in several important cultures women are expected to change their name when they marry, although this seems like a terrible idea to me and in general I recommend against it]
So it is entirely possible that they went "I think I will take the name Crow White, that's hilarious" and a PhD later they're a professor running research on corvids.
Edited to add mention of cultural convention to change names on marriage.
Montana is home to the Crow Reservation so it might be indigenous.
Probably Grip?
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Corvid-19 ?
Equipping cats and dogs with talking buttons (see, for example, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBh-BXgsO9IjhN-thTLvm... or https://www.youtube.com/@floundercat) has shown me there is a lot more going in their little heads than I suspected. There are examples of cats describing their dreams, or worrying about what will happen in the future, or theorizing about the nature of the world (in a very naive way).
Birds have higher neural density than mammals (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113) so can pack a lot into their tiny heads. I do wonder what they'd have to say, if given the chance.
I started doing this with my cat. It's easy to try to explain away the underlying thought processes as coincidental association, and some of that is certainly true, but experiencing it first hand with a cat you know well is certainly different. My cat presses a button for his name when he wants attentions, buttons for outside, food, water. A button for YouTube (the startup sound), since he likes watching other cats and critter videos and nature documentaries on there. I was working in the other room during a stormy day and he was watching some nature video when I heard him repeatedly pressing the YouTube button and his name. But he was already watching it? When I went out there, I saw there was a video playing with a cat that looked almost exactly like him on the screen. He seemed extremely interested. Did he think it was him? Or was he just calling attention that it looked like him and wanted to tell me? Either way, never saw that behavior before or after.
I would be wary of extrapolating too much from the talking buttons. Review the clever hans effect and (the critiques of) Koko the gorilla for examples of people misattributing classical conditioning for intentionality.
The fact is that humans are exceedingly quick to find patterns in random data (e.g. horescopes, any form of divination), and that tendency gets amplified when the opportunity to anthropomorphize a cute animal is presented.
Who's a pretty boy?