Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191211-crows-could-be-the-smartest-animal-other-than-primates

by hhs • 7 years ago

690 356 7 years ago

bbc.com

Lagogarda2• 7 years ago

I hate these birds

nemonemo• 7 years ago

Could this article explain why?

Lagogarda2• 7 years ago

noisy, attack people without a reason, kill other smaller birds, eat their eggs and nestling and take over their spot. I used to live in a neighbourhood with such a beautiful birds, now Crows took over an all I near in the morning is CRAAW CRAAW

newnewpdro• 7 years ago

They are a bit of a nuisance here, hate's a strong word but I'm at least a bit annoyed by them.

bigpumpkin• 7 years ago

Looking at the complexity and size of whale and dolphin brains, i suspect they are at least the equal of crows.

LessDmesg3• 7 years ago

Agreed. Birds have an inheren limit on head weight, which limits their brain size. They do manage to use what they have quite well (parrots are also remarkable in that regard), but the limit is there. Ultimately intelligence is a tough nut to crack for such a stupid and limited thing as evolution: some have a big brain but no hands, some have hands but cannot have a big brain because space is used for something else (e.g. bears), some have hands and space for brains but cannot increase head weight because not erect walking etc. Once you're erect, there's a tendency for arms to atrophy (think T-rex and ostriches). Jaws and the nasal cavity tend to take up space too, so an intelligent species needs to have weak olfactory sense and be a meat/fruit feeder. It's a miracle that a species like ours could combine all the necessary, quite fragile, ingredients to develop intelligence.

stevesimmons• 7 years ago

It's a miracle that a species like ours could combine all the necessary, quite fragile, ingredients to develop intelligence.

The Anthropic Principle says this combination must have happened with probability 1, otherwise there would be noone to observe it not happening.

duelingjello3• 7 years ago

Crows are social too, will hold a grudge... you's swear they were part Irish.

A crow once sneaked quite far into my mechanic's shop without being seen, got up on a rolling toolbox and stole a bag of sunflower seeds without being noticed. I found this because I saw a crow and their other crow buddies were having a sunflower seed party in the alley, and one of the mechanics lost their snack.

Also, crows will remember if you help them for years. People make a point to make friends with them because they have been known to bring gifts and visit year after year. Probably better company than the in-laws too. There's a number of documentaries and personal videos on YouTube about this topic.

PS: Davis CA has zillions of crows. An apartment I rented had large trees at the street containing easily several thousand in a dozen trees where they bedded-down for the night. The sidewalks and streets were coated white with droppings like it was SF's Fisherman's Wharf. Needless to say, no one used those sidewalks. And you could hear when they came back, because it sounded like a crow cocktail party.

burtonator2• 7 years ago

Crows are amazingly intelligent animals.

My GF and I went to the beach about a month ago and took our dog.

The crows weren't frightened at ALL of our dog. They realized they could basically just 'float' up in the air when he came by using the breeze.

The fact that they were amazingly calm about it was really telling.

Second. We hid our stuff under a blanket. They realize it's still there as they have item persistence. So they lifted up the blanket, went into our bag, then started opening up everything.

They opened up lids. They went through my girlfriends purse. They took out all the items from her purse. They took the socks out of my shoes. They opened plastic containers.

They systematically went through all our belongings.

And BOY did they score. All our dogfood. All of our leftover lunch, etc.

duelingjello3• 7 years ago

Yeap. Food and valuables have to be toddler-proofed around crows. They can also steal your wallet or your keys if you leave them unsecured.

And, damn, they're as good as human thieves at reading situations for opportunism.

User232• 7 years ago

I saw a crow steal a credit card off an outdoor table in Seattle once. They really are remarkable animals. Also I swear they have regional accents to their calls.

mrlala2• 7 years ago

Oh I learned this the hard way after a crow flew off with my money clip at the beach...

state_less2• 7 years ago

I was in Nepal having breakfast. Some crows are sitting there watching me eat. I look down to read my book, and in not more than a few seconds, I hear the clinking of dishes. I look up and the crows are flying off with my toast and jam. It was right in front of me, but they were quick enough to get in and out before I could react.

I realized that they are probably aware of my lack of attention to my food and that their in-built modeling of other agents had given them an advantage in this situation. I thought it was pretty impressive.

tunap• 7 years ago

I've observed Grand Canyon South Rim is a great example. They actively work the tourists who make hand-to-mouth gestures and steal when items are unguarded. Their team strategizing while hacking bear-proof garbage cans is impressive, too. One handles the door/partition while one or more enters for the snacks. I spent 1/2 a day watching them.

jayd16• 7 years ago

Gulls are pretty smart too. I've seen a flock case out a tourist as they set up their beach blanket. Once the tourist turns their back, they swoop in.

I've seen a one pull a closed brown lunch bag out of a freshly opened backpack, meaning the knew backpacks probably have food and brown bags are worth stealing and inspecting in detail elsewhere.

harimau7774• 7 years ago

I was at a beach where I was younger where people routinely fed the fish dog food. The fish had learned to recognize this and would swarm the person feeding them. The gulls in turn would actually step on the fish to get to the food.

Clearly, gulls are the honey badger of the bird world!

zentiggr4• 7 years ago

My wife grew up here in IL, we were visiting New England where I grew up and spent a day on Hampton Beach, her, I, and my daughter.

They started a game of using McD's french fries as lures to get the beach gulls to swoop in on unsuspecting kids as they were playing... sometimes 20 or 30 gulls at a time.

Felt like dropping spotter rounds for airstrikes.

(No children were harmed, just many french fries tossed instead of consumed.)

bristleworm• 7 years ago

That reminds me of the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park: "Unless they figure out how to open doors." :)

myu701• 7 years ago

In times when I'm in evil-overlord mode, I want to remove all lever-sets and replace them with doorknobs covered in toddler-spinny-thingies.

Doorknobs are not ADA compliant any longer, but if you are on a private island with utah-raptors? knobs.

jointpdf• 7 years ago

I wonder how kea (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea) compared to crows in terms of intelligence. I’ve heard those things are more than capable of breaking into vehicles.

Sharlin4• 7 years ago

They are also known to steal anvils. [1]

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Kea

peterashford2• 7 years ago

I remember seeing a program a while back which was comparing crows and kea and they concluded the kea was marginally smarter. Although, of course, that's related to the specific test they set - different tests might yield different results. They definitely are smart, tho

jhoechtl• 7 years ago

No animal is more a thief than the monkey gang up on The Rock of Gibraltar

m4634• 7 years ago

They probably learned it from the seagulls. or at least traded techniques :)

search for "seagull thief" videos.

arketyp• 7 years ago

Birds' intelligence is especially interesting because the ontogeny differs from that of primates and other mammals like the dolphins. Maybe it can help triangulate our views about intelligence and give parallax insight into what general intelligence is and what to expect of AI without resorting to anthropocentric Turing test arguments only.

mettamage4• 7 years ago

cephlapods, primates, crows. I wonder if someone studied all three.

comboy• 7 years ago

wonder no more https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%2Bc...

protonfish• 7 years ago

I believe that people have a strong aversion to doing this. So many still refuse to believe Darwin for suggesting that we are closely related to other animals. Imagine the pushback for stating that we are just another species with higher intelligence? That hits us humans where we think we are really special and important. This keeps AI research safely in bed with ANNs that pose no threat to discovering deep and unflattering truths about ourselves and our place on Earth.

Ididntdothis• 7 years ago

They also like to annoy other animals. I have seen it now a few times that a crow or a group of crows would approach a dog from behind and nip their tail or butt. When the dog turns around the crow will jump back a little and pretend it has nothing to do with this. When the dog looks away they will do it again. I have seen similar behavior with swans. When my dog chases they get out of the way but only the minimum needed.

Very smart but obnoxious in a way.

Just found this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y0xwX5iOFok

praptak2• 7 years ago

They also do this to cats, which is much more dangerous. There's a video with a cat catching a bird (not a crow) that did this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nfIQifAcm0g

tempguy99992• 7 years ago

I think that's different. I'd guess the cat was unknowningly getting near the bird's nest + kids so mother was panicking.

ajuc4• 7 years ago

Sometimes they do this to steal winter fur for nests.

huffmsa• 7 years ago

To me, the "will they mess with other animals for giggles" and "do they recognize other intelligent animals" are the barrier for entry into the "intelligence" consideration.

Dolphins (including orca) do, primates do, the article says crows do. Cats and dogs do too.

blattimwind3• 7 years ago

It just takes 2-3 crows to make any cat run and hide. The cat knows it can't take them on...

girvo2• 7 years ago

Wild sulphur crested cockatoos that live in the scrub behind my fence do this to my neighbours dog.

It never stops being funny to me

pmoriarty2• 7 years ago

This article focuses mostly on problem solving, planning, and tool use as the primary hallmarks of intelligence. But what problem does writing a poem solve? Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem? What about the intelligence need to compose a great whale song[1]? Or paint a great painting?

These are things not measured on intelligence tests and that don't fit well in to scientific experiments because they can't be "objectively" judged or quantified, but my intuition is that they do in fact have to do with intelligence -- just not the sort of intelligence that problem solving, planning, and tool use demonstrate. Though they may require problem solving, planning, or tool use to accomplish, there seems to be something else going on there.

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams quote: "... on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons."

[1] - ...if such criteria could be applied to them -- we don't know, and that's part of the point. If we don't know how can we judge one animal who does one thing to be "smarter" than another who does something else?

marmaduke• 7 years ago

Maybe the requirement of starting with problem solving to establish is an issue with the audience and not the author. Imagine starting out by showing the sorts of innovative play that crows engage in, and no one (or at least during blind peer review) would accept it as evidence of intelligence, even if it is.

Tepix3• 7 years ago

Early humans didn't have poetry. Were they not intelligent?

dilippkumar• 7 years ago

Early humans didn't have poetry.

[Citation Needed]

gerbilly3• 7 years ago

Do you mean written 'academic' poetry?

Because poetry had a more day to day use than that. The rhythm and the rhyming is a mnemonic device. It makes it much easier to remember a text than when spoken in prose.

I can't imagine even our early ancestors not making use of that. In fact the earliest literature was passed from generation to generation as an oral tradition.

earthicus• 7 years ago

I just finished reading the book 'Gifts of the Crow' by Marzluff & Angell, which is a popularization of current research into Corvid intelligence, consisting of anecdotes, experiments, and neuroscience.

Academics do, in fact, study recreation & play, language & song, and expressions of emotion like grief. They are considered indicators of some kind of intelligence worth studying. The book even devotes a chapter to each of those topics!

hos234• 7 years ago

I think larger the population, larger the hyperconnection less interesting/impactful is individual intelligence and creativity. What will overshadow individuals is what the group intelligence/creativity produces.

There are no Van Gogh's anymore just Pixar.

coldtea2• 7 years ago

This article focuses mostly on problem solving, planning, and tool use as the primary hallmarks of intelligence. But what problem does writing a poem solve?

The problem of expressing yourself to a specific, deeper, degree than with mere talk? And/or (in olde times, when poems where meant to be accompanied by music/oration) creating something people can be entertained with and sing/dance too.

Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem?

Yes. Mind you, it doesn't mean it's technical intelligence, the kind that solves math problems etc. It's intelligence with words, wordplay, expression, feelings, ways of seeing, etc.

arnautdaniel• 7 years ago

Quantification seems to be the degradation of perception towards the proper understanding of human ability. It seems realistic to say that humans prefer simple matrices with which to view reality.

Consider when someone common argues politics, but their first inclination is to fall back to statistics. They have now canceled out the component sum of all other elements in the set of understanding, only to rely on numbers as the indicator of truth.

Boethius once wrote about the 10 properties of man, one being number, and the others being place, position, attributes...etc. Yet, most of these are rarely used when you really get down to it.

Ezra Pound once made a statement that poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost.

And there really lies the connection I mean to give. Poetry is that which embraces Boethius' 10 properties including the numeric. Math in the most pure sense is focused only on quantity until it is applied to a context. (Physics, etc).

Language in itself is, discounting the vocal portions, a tool of symbolic manipulation. And from this one can generate a theory of linguistics, much like the Greeks, as that which binds symbols to images within a context, and the intended excitation of the senses.

Even math is explained and used as bound symbols within a context followed by a sort of kinesthetic sense.

Atop both of these, respectively, is grammar and the rules of mathematics.

Anyway, this is getting too long for a comment but this is my point.

- I think language and math are under a unified form of intelligence because the utilities used to perform them reach towards the same foundation.

- Poetry and writing is underappreciated not because it is technically inept, but for the reason that society has currently degraded it's understanding towards a single attribute (the numeric) and interprets anything that isn't a number as something which must originate from emotion.

- Emotion is hard to quantify so it is viewed as a isolated creative art that is not perceived as a criteria for what people mean when they think about intelligence.

- The author and the poet can and should be using their art with a technical foundation.

- Our current writers actually imply the state of society far greater than we think, which is ironic because they have the power to lead society.

- Intelligence tests as a metric imply an end result which is numeric. This is not a whole picture. Even if the number is representative of an abstract process used to indicate the success of solving a problem.

In other, other words, writing is viewed as a lesser art when it comes to quantifying intelligence because it is incompatible with such a motion in a world where the only viewpoint funnels into the numeric. It is also lesser because the quality of contemporary writing has a stark contrast to those works before us.

john111• 7 years ago

I really wish we had better definitions for "smart", "cognition", and "intelligence." With our current definitions, all comparisons are purely subjective. Maybe crows are the "smartest" today. Tomorrow it'll be dolphins, parrots, elephants, pigs, or cephalopods. Who knows?

ralusek• 7 years ago

I mean, there are pretty objective things to test for.

Object permanence.

How many things can they keep in working memory?

How many steps can they work through linearly to an objective?

How many dependent elements of a puzzle can be branched off for a single step?

Can they understand symbols as being representative of objects? Of verbs? Adjectives?

Can they understand counting, grouping?

Can they extrapolate solutions from one puzzle to another? How dissimilar can they appear for them to still recognize patterns?

Are they creative? Are they social?

wruza2• 7 years ago

Can they abelinize a simplicial resolvent and show that it is an integer cohomology of a given group?

Razengan2• 7 years ago

One overriding question may be: Do they need to?

There are things that other animals can do which humans can't, such as an octopus communicating with a grouper fish, two entirely different species, by changing the color and patterns of their skin, to corral and trap a prey (as seen on a segment of BBC's Blue Planet.)

Are humans "dumber" if we use that objective criteria to compare intelligence?

edoo• 7 years ago

There are also videos on youtube of crows that learned to wait for the walk signal to walk into a crosswalk to drop off a hard nut shell that car tires then crush and they then walk back out to pick up the now exposed food.

riffraff• 7 years ago

I've seen crows do this on my own neighborhood, both on side streets with little traffic, and on main streets on the crosswalk. I had heard of crows doing this in Japan but was impressed to see this in central Europe (although it's corvus cornix, the grey-black kind, not the full black one)

SiVal• 7 years ago

We have crows and jackrabbits in our neighborhood. You drive down the road toward a bunch (I think they prefer the term "murder") of crows having a meeting in the middle of the road. They'll eventually start nonchalantly strolling to the side at a calm, measured pace perfectly timed to just barely get out of the way as you pass and stroll back again, no feathers ruffled.

Jackrabbits will be sitting safely in the grass on the side of the road, see you coming, watch until you're about to pass, have a panic attack, and sprint in front of your car just as you pass in order to "escape". I never slow down for crows. They know what they're doing. I slow down for my fellow mammals, jackrabbits, because they're nitwits. All I can say, looking at these birds and these rabbits, is: that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and took out the competition sure was a lucky break for us.

interfixus• 7 years ago

Oh yes! I live in a mostly rural area with lots of roaming fauna. Deer, hares, hedgehogs, cats of course, martens, rodents, foxes, all kinds of birds. Both when driving privately and when at work as a bus driver, I am observant and conscientious about all this wildlife: The roads are full of roadkill, which both saddens and angers me - but none of it is mine; I keep my eyes on the road, and I slow down for everybody.

Except for the crows and the rooks. I keep an eye on them, and keep a foot poised for braking, but I never have to. They stroll, as you describe it, quite nonchalantly out the way, sometimes leaving a walnut for my vehicle to please crush. And here's the thing: They happily stroll into the opposite lane, if - and only if - no cars are approaching from the opposite direction. Complete grasp of the traffic situation, and they hardly ever fail - during the last year, I have seen one dead crow at the roadside; I'm gessing he took cool one step to far.

seszett• 7 years ago

To be fair though, birds have had to adapt long ago to evaluating the movement of very fast moving objects, while rabbits and most mammals have not really had to cope with fast speeds until humans invented cars just a century ago.

tjchear• 7 years ago

Predators like lions and cheetahs achieve top speeds comparable to a car driving on freeway tho.

classified• 7 years ago

Are you forgetting the birds of prey?

djtriptych• 7 years ago

But to be fairer (to crows), I've witnessed crows just cross the yellow painted lines in a road to get to safety. They've adapted to our traffic rules.

tempguy99992• 7 years ago

Rabbits are prey animals. I don't think(?) crows are.

Prey animals are wary and startle easily to reduce their chance of becoming lunch.

sean-duffy• 7 years ago

Pigeons do the exact same though, I never slow down for them because I know they always fly out of the way just in time, even when it looks like you're about to roll over them.

jgraham• 7 years ago

Pigeons have been trained to discriminate between different styles of art [1], which suggests complex, adaptable, visual processing and skill retention. So they may not be a great example of a bird that can only exhibit simple behaviours.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1334394/

pepy• 7 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPCZtrac-Ss

aspaviento• 7 years ago

Well, you should. Pigeons can have an illness or fights that make them loose some toes and because of this, they can walk slowly or not react as fast as the others. One day I saw one on the street while a truck was comming fast towards it. I heard pretty clear a "plop" sound, like the sound of a bag exploding. I just hear it because I didn't want to look at it. It's not the kind of image you want to remember.

iainmerrick2• 7 years ago

I thought the same until I almost got a pigeon trapped in my bicycle pedal! It got dragged along for several seconds before it managed to flap away. Not one of the bright ones, I guess.

harimau7774• 7 years ago

On the other hand, if you are out driving and there's a flock of Canadian Geese walking across the road, try only slowing down to 5 to 10 mph. They are used to people stopping until they finish crossing so they freak out when you don't.

Note: I generally do not advocate purposely messing with animals, but geese are evil! Also don't do this if there are young that might not be able to get out of the way in time.

kldavis4• 7 years ago

Canada Geese not Canadian :)

aiphex• 7 years ago

Canada Geese are not evil, they just don't take shit from humans. They can be very chill (after they have mated). They flock to my university every year and they will walk side by side around campus with the students like they're one of them.

buryat• 7 years ago

what about orcas?

mrtksn• 7 years ago

Previously I heard about crows in Japan leaving nuts on the way of the cars to crash them when traffic lights are red and collecting them the next cycle. This summer I witnessed the exact same thing when I was driving through a particularly jammy traffic light here in Europe.

Are these crows inventing the method over and over again independently, like scientists finding the same thing at the same time in different parts of the world? Is this some very basic instinct that the crows evolved into? Are they teaching each other and now the Euro crows using Japanise tech? Fascinating creatures.

axegon2• 7 years ago

Exact thing happened to me one or two days ago. I was driving home and on a small street near my apartment a crow flew out of the bushes and dropped something right in front of the car and then it landed on the other side of the street. When I looked back in the mirror, the crow had gone back to collect what looked like a walnut.

On a semi-related note, magpies are also doing really well in that race. End of last year I started leaving oatmeal in a bottle cap on my terrace and every morning a magpie came to eat it every single day over the course of 2 months. And every evening when I came back home I had a handful of sticks, stones and berries left somewhere. No idea what I was supposed to do with them but thanks magpie I guess...

mcv3• 7 years ago

I thought magpies were supposed to be thieves, but you seem to have an honest one that pays for its food.

mettamage4• 7 years ago

I read an article about crows in Australia killing a very poisonous frog. They are able to teach each other was the conclusion of that article. I don't have time atm to find the article.

monkeycantype• 7 years ago

It’s mentioned in this article: http://theconversation.com/eat-your-heart-out-native-water-r...

pmjordan• 7 years ago

For what it's worth, crows in Central Europe have been doing this for decades. They (carrion crows) used to do it outside my childhood home in Austria ~25 years ago. (Very light traffic, so no traffic lights; they just put some nuts in place when they heard a car coming.) They would generally first attempt to crack the nuts simply by dropping them onto the road from a height. I guess they left the ones that didn't crack on impact at terminal velocity for the cars to deal with.

There may well have been multiple independent discoveries, and passing the skill on between individuals and generations has probably made it near-ubiquitous now.

csomar2• 7 years ago

I wonder if what makes humans "intelligent" is exactly this. Plus we have a 70-90 years of life. Which is long enough to learn and do stuff, compare that to 10-15 years for your average crow.

We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.

Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.

That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.

tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.

andrewflnr• 7 years ago

I'd say it still takes a lot of intelligence for all that training to be effective. If we were much dumber it wouldn't even help. Long life is probably necessary but definitely not sufficient.

j8014• 7 years ago

My 10 year old can start a fire, create a shelter, gather/sterilize water, hunt, trap, clean game and cook it. Humans are scary smart compared to other life and can easily pickup survival skills, manipulate their environments to suit them, even as a child.

filoleg• 7 years ago

Sounds like a good theory, until you think about animals like parrots and turtles. Both of those have lifespans that are about as long as that of humans, and no doubt they are very intelligent (esp. pronounced with parrots), but not smart enough to be able to support your hypothesis.

iainmerrick2• 7 years ago

a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training

If by "bring food to the table" you mean "earn a good salary at a very specialised job", maybe -- although 21 years is more like it.

But for literally bringing food to the table, basic survival skills, you're talking more like 8-10 years.

amanaplanacanal2• 7 years ago

I’ve seen the same behavior in the Pacific Northwest. It seems to be widespread.

stevewilhelm• 7 years ago

We also focus on the abilities of an individual.

There can be a fair amount of complex behavior of groups. Ants and plants for example

http://web.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/26/the-intellige...

rkagerer2• 7 years ago

The "Just for Fun" link[1] leads to some entertaining videos:

Skiing down a roof: https://youtu.be/1WupH8oyrAo

My girlfriend's spirit animal: https://youtu.be/Qt-pB1R64mI

Teaming up to provoke a catfight: https://youtu.be/WQd9kuXpUYU

Nipping a sausage: https://youtu.be/Y0xwX5iOFok

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/scientists-investiga...

etxm• 7 years ago

If you haven’t seen the CrowBox, a vending machine for crows, it’s pretty cool.

http://www.thecrowbox.com/

newman8r2• 7 years ago

When I was ~10 years old, I found a fake decorative crow (Halloween stuff) and I figured out that I could jump up and down with the fake crow and it would only be a matter of time before a few real crows would start circling... 15 minutes later there would be 100 circling, then thousands. It became a party trick that I'd show friends every now and then.

scotth• 7 years ago

Why do you think they were interested?

newman8r2• 7 years ago

I always assumed it was because they thought I was attacking one of their flock, like they were trying to intimidate me. They never came close or swooped down or anything. Just circled hundreds of feet above.

User232• 7 years ago

Country folk assure me that crows can also not only tell the difference between a gun and a stick, but they also have a pretty good idea of what the effective range of the gun is.

blattimwind3• 7 years ago

"What are you gonna do with that .22 pistol, human? Shoot me? At 40 yards? kra-kra-kra!"

technothrasher• 7 years ago

That crow is a little over confident. 40 yards isn't all that hard on a crow size target with at .22 pistol, with practice. Back up about another 20 yards and the crow is probably pretty safe.

harimau7774• 7 years ago

My father often tries to shoot the crows in his garden. However, as soon as he opens the door with a rifle they take off. I'm secretly always rooting for the crows.

Todd• 7 years ago

I was recently reading the Wikipedia page about comparative neuron counts in the brains of various animals. The most notable observation to me at the time was that ravens have a similar neuron count that of to pigs and dogs--far more than cats, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

raverbashing• 7 years ago

It seems neuron counts matter, but at the same time they don't have a big effect?

Elephants are intelligent but not that much per the number of cells. Raccons are probably more intelligent than cats and have more neurons, ok. And why are Capybaras surprisingly high on the list?

wahern• 7 years ago

This author seems a little too eager to attribute exceptional behavior, but they provide some interesting anecdotes and videos about capybara behavior: https://capybaraworld.wordpress.com/2017/05/14/theory-of-min...

avainlakech• 7 years ago

I used to live near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and I could swear that the crows there are mimicking the sound of the fog horns.

Iv2• 7 years ago

I am wondering where sulphur-crested cockatoo are on the scale. Before seeing some in freedom up close in Australia, I never realized they actually could grab objects with their claws like they are hands and put them in their mouth.

They seemed very smart to me. I wonder if they lose to crow only because they are less prevalent around most labs in the world...

dmurray• 7 years ago

Parrots get mentioned all the time in animal intelligence research. Normally the experiments take different forms: you keep one parrot in captivity and teach it to speak, while you observe the behaviour of groups of crows in the wild.

Iv2• 7 years ago

What surprised me witht he cuckatoo was its size. I think typical parrots are smaller. Now I know the size-intelligence relationship is very tenuous, but within a similar order, it may have a value?

EdwardDiego• 7 years ago

I highly recommend this book, written by two American ornithologists watching kea in the field for years:

https://www.amazon.com/Kea-Bird-Paradox-Evolution-Behavior/d...

blompa• 7 years ago

Here is a video of a sulphur-crested cockatoo, very determinedly pushing a brick off a rubbish bin in order to be able to access its contents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOpFZYVpezI

It's quite incredible to me, the way it seems to understand the physics of the brick quite well.

arooaroo• 7 years ago

I know someone who works at one of the London airports and is responsible for keeping the runway operational. One of the jobs is keeping the birds well clear, and if necessary, sadly, may resort to shooting.

The crows know the score though. This acquiantance says the crows know to disappear if they see the bird clearers. What's "clever" is that they only take flight if it's one of the shooters. They recognise the veichle(s) despite them being all the same fleet. So if someone else is driving round to check something else, the birds completely ignore. If it's the "bird guy" then off they go with little encouragement.

rkagerer2• 7 years ago

Story of a crow who adopted a kitten and nursed it back to health: https://youtu.be/inbPgr8IMlM

Gupie• 7 years ago

A couple of years ago we were holidaying in Kent, UK, and went for a walk on the South Downs. There was a guy in a hide shooting crows. He was at the edge of a field and had put some sort of lure in the middle of the field. Crows would fly down and he would shoot them. There were thirty or so dead birds grouped around the lure, but the crows continued to fly down, and continued to get shot. This makes me think that crow intelligence is as it were not general.

ModernMech• 7 years ago

We need to put signs next to cliffs to remind people not to fall to their deaths while taking photos of themselves. Let's not pretend humans aren't incredibly stupid animals at times as well.

fl0wenol• 7 years ago

All he was accomplishing was thinning the herd of the dumb ones. He's going to be responsible one day for The Incident.

soufron• 7 years ago

Which tells you how smart dinosaurs could have been...

LessDmesg3• 7 years ago

Birds are dinosaurs, the only surviving clade of them. You don't have to watch Jurassic Park to see a living dinosaur, just look at a pigeon or crow!

DagAgren4• 7 years ago

Look at a chicken! They are incredibly dinosaur-like.

Arn_Thor• 7 years ago

I read that as "cows" and thought "I never woulda guessed, but suppose it makes sense". I think it's time to call it a day

archi422• 7 years ago

Yeah, though cows are probably not completely dumb, either (maybe less intelligent than crows, but who am I to judge?). This one enjoys playing with a huge ball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx-CxuAeVPo

Maybe they just seem dumb because they're usually bored to death standing on the grass with nothing to do but eat?

b0rsuk2• 7 years ago

A bit off-topic: it's not just intelligence that's amazing about (some) birds.

I highly recommend the book "The wonder of birds" by Jim Robbins. One of the earliest insights in the book is that birds are the dinosaurs that survived. They are amazingly adapted.

The unusual thing is that each chapter is full of intriguing information and each one is a different topic.

Like, how could birds possibly evolve wings? A wing is only useful if it's a working wing, and if a bird evolved half a wing it would be pointless, right? It turns out half a wing is useful. It speeds up running birds, especially up a slope.

Feathers actually grow outside first, and the stem last.

The amazing efficiency and optimization of their hearts and respiratory systems.

Bird guano used to be so valuable that Incas punished bird killers with death. Natural fertilizers are very important if you try to make the most of poor mountainous soil.

b0rsuk2• 7 years ago

I heard an interesting theory about intelligence while watching a documentary about jumping spiders.

Good eyesight tends to evolve first. In the case of jumping spiders, it was vital for safe landing. As a consequence, jumping spiders have the best eyesight among spiders. Anyway, initially brain gets a lot of extra information but is unable to take advantage of all of it. It's just for safe landing. Then those animals that find way to exploit the extra data become more effective.

Jumping spiders are devious, for example they can lure prey by mimicking gestures the insect uses.

saiya-jin• 7 years ago

In latest BBC seven worlds one planet, there is nice display of their mating dance... fascinating little buggers (like all other animals on the show, small and big)

jwilliams• 7 years ago

There are reports of crows in South America using traffic to crack hard nuts. They wait for cars to stop at a traffic light, leave the hard nuts out, wait for the green light — and then collect the results on the next red.

The same birds will fly up and drop nuts to crack them. What is notable is they will fly in diminishing lower arcs to drop the nuts. It’s a precise conservation of energy.

Remarkable stuff.

paozac• 7 years ago

It's very difficult to tell which is the smartest animal - or whether an animal is intelligent or not - because intelligence is a broad concept and there are many kinds of intelligence.

If you're interested in this topic a good book is "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?", by Frans de Waal.

defined• 7 years ago

I highly recommend that book!

MrsPeaches• 7 years ago

This is a great Ted talk about crows and how their intelligence differs from that of other animals.

Lots of other comments talking about crows using cars to crack nuts. In this talk, he traces the behaviour to a driving school on the or skirts of Tokyo. The behaviour then spread across Tokyo.

https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_a_thought_experiment_...

jktj2• 7 years ago

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/revengeful-crows-refus... "Shiva Kewat, resident of a village in Madhya Pradesh's Shivpuri has been a target of a murder of crows that remembers him for causing the death of a chick."

Lammy• 7 years ago

I love crows enough to put up with it, but it's sad that this page shows the header, the footer, and a giant sea of empty whitespace where the article should be until I allow Javascript from `bbcverticals.com`

netcan• 7 years ago

It's fascinating that intelligence exists in different clades & phylum of animals: crows, octopus, apes etc. It suggests intelligence is not very progressive, in evolution. It advances & recedes, and evolution can find multiple paths to it from various starting point. It doesn't take a mammalian brain.

Who know what other animal intelligence exists today, or in the past.

The current crop of species (us excepted) may not be the smartest to have existed, problem solving intelligence like the crow's could have existed 500 mya as easily as it can now. You don't need mammals, or even necessarily vertebrates.

The first thing I found fascinating in YNH's "Sapiens" was his "start of history" debate. When did people start really standing out from the faunal crowd. He puts this at just around 40 kya.

That is, people were walking around with modern sized & equipped brain hardware for hundreds of thousands of years. They were obviously extremely intelligent. They would have performed as well as us on such intelligence tests.

If sapiens had gone extinct before 40kya, they would have left no indication that their intelligence such potential that it did. They would have just been a smart animal.

londons_explore3• 7 years ago

Intelligence might be easy to evolve, but have a high energy cost.

In many environments, the extra intelligence wouldn't allow you to find enough extra food for the trait to be worthwhile.

vintermann• 7 years ago

There's a huge flock of crows gathering near a golf course where I live every winter. I looked it up, and apparently this species live pairwise in summer but in huge flocks in winter.

I honestly wonder how they can find enough food, there are so many of them.

TheOtherHobbes2• 7 years ago

A wild untrained human animal isn't that bright. We can probably operate above the crow level, but maybe not by much.

What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication.

Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer.

But it took a surprisingly long time - tens of thousands of years - for our brains to make this ability central to culture. And there's no guarantee that if we re-ran history we'd do it again on the same scale.

jdck1326• 7 years ago

It seems like you're suggesting that there aren't massive biological differences between a wild human and a crow. This is false. Humans have many biological faculties that crows simply do not have.

For example, the wild, untrained human still has the biological faculty of language.

That is, there is a reason why no animal other than a human has been shown to be able to learn a language. The reason is that they do not have the biological faculty of language.

You suggest that "generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems/" This is correct, but in many important ways it is not because of our culture or because we learn from our elders. But rather it is because of our genetics.

An example of this is that children who are not taught a language will spontaneously create their own. Normally this won't happen, because children can't survive without adults, and adults will teach the children language. But something very close has happened a few times, an example, in itself far from conclusive, but still illustrative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

DagAgren4• 7 years ago

Crows do this to some extent. They gather collective knowledge and pass it on to their offspring. If you act maliciously towards a crow, it will teach its friends that you are dangerous, and they will all warn each other if you approach. This will keep happening even after the original crows are dead, because they will teach their children that you are an asshole, too, even though those children may never have seen you do anything wrong.

jancsika2• 7 years ago

A wild untrained human animal isn't that bright. We can probably operate above the crow level, but maybe not by much.

That's such a misanthropic statement I don't even know where to begin.

Just sticking to the kinds of structures a human and a crow can build in the wild, it's still obvious to the untrained observer that the human is well beyond the crow in terms of intelligence.

dexen• 7 years ago

What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication.

No; passing on knowledge isn't quite sufficient. The key difference is our ability to manipulate objects with hands, and our ability to harness external sources of energy, starting with fire.

Cetaceans (in particular orcas and dolphins), chimps, crows, they all are known to develop & pass on language, culture, and knowledge like hunting tricks. Cetaceans, and also octopuses have relatively high intelligence. The former live in long-running packs (pods), and pass on their distinct cultures, language dialects, and hunting habits. The later live with little to no contact with their parents, and have to discover everything from grounds up. Both have been around for much longer than humans. Neither have progressed anywhere near close to having a technological civilization, and are on relatively similar level.

marcosdumay• 7 years ago

I don't think the expression "wild untrained human" even makes sense. There haven't been any wild untrained human ancestor since a long time before humans appeared.

Also, most smart animals have persistent knowledge that they pass from one generation to the other.

We are just smarter than those other animals. Tens of thousands of years ago, humans were already a force not to be messed with. Hell, a million years ago our ancestors were already on the business of extinguishing their predators.

antisthenes• 7 years ago

Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer.

We also don't have to spend 80-90% of our time in a struggle for survival against the elements during this crucial learning period.

Humans in developed countries are typically provided for, while doing the majority of their learning.

usrusr• 7 years ago

It's an interesting perspective to think of pre-agricultural (the 40k line is admittedly before that) humans as not standing out amongst other fauna, but on the other hand there is no reason to imagine them standing out any less than groups that stayed hunter-gatherers into modern times and those certainly do/did. They would not have left many traces identifiable after tens of millennia though, not now, not then.

General intelligence, by itself, appears to be just one possible strategy for adapting to the environment, not inherently superior considering that many species get along just fine with survival tactics "hardwired" for their environment. But it sure gives faster adaptability and humans had expanded into very diverse environments deep in the stone age.

What eventually set the human brain apart is the old cliche distinction of opposable thumbs. Back to topic, few things illustrate the value of our hands better that watching a crow headbutt an object with its beak, stop to ponder the results, then headbutt again because what other option does it have?

jbattle• 7 years ago

Counterpoints:

- Cave art from 44kya https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/440000-year-old-cave-art-d...

- 'Venus' statues - some possibly as old as 300k years!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines

I agree that the fact intelligence has arisen in wildly separate parts of the 'tree of life' probably indicates something about the likelihood for intelligence to develop elsewhere. Like you said, it's not a fluke, but it's also not something that only arises under very specific progressive conditions.

I'm not sure whether it recedes or not - that's an interesting and slightly terrifying question

hellofunk• 7 years ago

What!? Smarter than ravens?! The blasphemy!

philshem• 7 years ago

Funny and interesting was a recent episode of RadioLab

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/world...

bloak• 7 years ago

What amazes me about crows is the intelligence they achieve with such a small brain. That elephants and whales are highly intelligent is perhaps less impressive.

I can't think of any reasonable way to compare the intelligence of a whale with the intelligence of a crow. It's hard enough to compare the intelligence of two humans when they have different personalities and interests.

Eisenfaust• 7 years ago

smart, but kinda annoying. i guess when you understand that you're more intelligent than others you also understand that it's easy for you to outcompete others. that's what us humans do and also looks that crows are at the same page

dta3456• 7 years ago

When I was a child, I'd spend a lot of time at my grandfathers farm, and one summer he took in an injured crow that hurt its wing.

For some strange reason, he named all of his animals Jack, cats, dogs and now crows. So we'd go out in the morning and my grandfather would call out "Jack" and the Dog would come running down the yard, and then next thing you'd see the crow hopping down the yard after the dog. It would arrive and wait for him to pick it up with his hand and it would sit on his shoulder while he fed it nuts and seeds. Jack the dog and Jack the crow would also hang out together and play. It also would be very wary of other visitors and knew to leave the house if it was going to go to the toilet.

This went on for maybe a full year until it decided to just fly off, but throughout that time it really opened my eyes to how smart animals could actually be, and is a really fond memory of mine.

dbingham• 7 years ago

Crows also have vocal chords capable of producing human language, and - similar to parrots - they can learn human phrases in the right conditions.

My partner used to volunteer at the local Wildcare and they had an injured crow resident that they couldn't release named Da Vinci. Da Vinci would always greet visitors with "Hello! How are you? How are you?"

inkstain• 7 years ago

My wife and I used to return to the same place in the woods and would try to attract and feed crows. Once we were packed up and preparing to leave with crows watching us as my wife distributed more peanuts while she was trying to caw like them but I then found that the crows were changing some of their caws seemingly to mimic my wife's imitation and then purely by accident I coughed and a nearby crow clearly mimicked my cough!

I love crows, they have lots of character if you take time to observe them.

ottolin• 7 years ago

I had a similar experience. When I was a kid I used to buy grocery from a local store. There was a crow greeting every single customer with "Hello! Dinner yet? Dinner yet?". I think that's a good way to connect with local customers :)

sutterbomb• 7 years ago

I was staying in a hostel in the Philippines and they had a pet crow that would greet you, but he'd also fuck with you - or at least me. He'd say "Come here" over and over until I went over to him, then he'd turn away from me when I got there. As soon as I turned back away he'd say "come here" again. Funny little shit.

m4634• 7 years ago

There are lots of youtube videos of talking (and swearing) crows.

It's more likely to happen with parrots (since they can legally be kept as pets and interact with humans more closely), but crows have the brainpower for it.

EvanAnderson• 7 years ago

There is an American Crow in an enclosure at a local wildlife rescue. He can't be released because of his injuries, so he's one of the center's permanent residents. He won't speak on command, but he will immitate sounds he hears (he does a ringtone sort of sound) and he will say "American Crow" every so often.

blackearl• 7 years ago

Crows and Ravens can also sound very human. There are some videos on youtube that are pretty unnerving. Makes for good background to Poe's famous story.

fredsanford• 7 years ago

When I was 12 or so we had a neighbor who had a pet raven or crow, not sure which. But this bird did the owners cigarette cough and gravel gert voice perfectly for 10 or so words.

Someone later gave the guy a mynah bird that had a 30 or so word vocabulary. The birds eventually taught each other the words and the cough.

It was pretty funny to walk past that house on a nice day and hear 3 cigarette coughs and hearing the mynah say happy halloween in a sort-of witch voice no matter the time of the year.

derefr2• 7 years ago

So we'd go out in the morning and my grandfather would call out "Jack" and the Dog would come running down the yard, and then next thing you'd see the crow hopping down the yard after the dog.

Tangent: this is a handy effect, if you could get it to work, but it’s a bit surprising if it did work: animals have different audible frequency ranges, and, obviously, they’ll only respond to a name they can hear. Dogs and crows might have similar audible ranges (this is suggestive anecdata to that effect!), but I know that the range for cats is slightly higher, such that a name like “jack” wouldn’t even register to them. (You need a name with a close/front vowel sound in it, since humans produce those with a high pitch. Thus why the word “kitty” is thought to exist—it evolved as an optimal call-name! Or you can just “pspsps”, since that also comes out high-enough that cats hear it quite clearly.)

From what you said, there was also a cat named “jack”—did it come when called? If so, did calling it require a second, higher-keyed calling of the name?

hailk• 7 years ago

Also, cats aren't as social as either dogs or crows (collaborative hunting wise). Cats not coming when summoned is a very common thing, even when they recognise their names.

WalterBright• 7 years ago

such that a name like “jack” wouldn’t even register to them

My experience disagrees. I often have a back and forth "conversation" with my cat, and she clearly responds to my voice, which is not high pitched.

klenwell• 7 years ago

That's a wonderful story. My only New Year's resolution this year was to befriend a crow. So far, no progress. Maybe next year.

dobleboble• 7 years ago

This is also a goal of mine. I have read that they like peanuts still in the shell.

bdamm• 7 years ago

You'd probably need to start with a lone crow. As a group they can be quite nefarious and clever about it. I once slowed down a group of crows from killing and eating an injured bird; once they boldly got past my interference, they formed a sub-group and that sub-group followed me all the way home (1/2 mile) hopping from tree to tree, cawing the whole way.

girvo2• 7 years ago

Two crows have recently taken up residence in my backyard, along with my friendly bush turkey, Doug. They’re so much fun to watch and interact with!

bananamerica• 7 years ago

Your grandpa sounds like a great guy.

Phrenzy• 7 years ago

Who, Jack? Yeah, he's a great guy.

wDcBKgt66V8WDs• 7 years ago

Inverse story: my dad sprayed water at a crow on his lawn, the crow then took to perching on the clogged gutter above the front door and kicking water at anyone who walked under.

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

Please tell me this was a multi-year grudge.

m4634• 7 years ago

Being a Dad means to set a good example. Otherwise you get buffonery like this. :)

perl4ever2• 7 years ago

This made me think, what is a jackdaw? Turns out...it's a kind of crow.

fyfy18• 7 years ago

I remember a few months ago I saw some crows in a park. They were going through a bin and pulling out McDonalds paper bags, and ripping them apart to see if there was anything inside.

Whenever someone came near they would move away from the bin and started looking around aimlessly, as if to say "there's nothing going on here".

codeduck• 7 years ago

A pet crow is one of the most rewarding relationships you can experience.

Nothing will teach you powerlessness like the friendly, loving malevolence of a corvid.

rootbear• 7 years ago

I need that last sentence on a T-shirt. Bravo!

Razengan2• 7 years ago

Where are octopuses? Are they third smartest?

I don't think intelligence is a linear scale or gradient, or even a cube, more like a cluster of multiple features/drivers/daemons operating at different strengths in different species, all shaped by the needs of their bodies.

twoflower9• 7 years ago

When I was a kid a crow got it's head stuck in our gate. I ran and got my dad who got it free. For the next ten years the crows would attack magpies whenever they tried to swoop me in our street.

CRUDite• 7 years ago

They know how to use glass. We had a rooftop area enclosed by glass and the crows would frequently corral pigeons there and kill them, either directly pecking them or indirectly chasing them into the glass. They may know how to use it, but what is it? This is another question..One morning i heard clicking / tapping coming from upstairs near this roof top; up the stairs i went, i peered over the top of the stairs toward the door to the rooftop, and saw two of them tapping the glass, then looking at each other, then tapping the glass again. They saw me and flew off in a panic. I may be anthropomorphising but it sure did look like they were sizing up this wonder material between them! I felt like i had seen a window into their world in that moment before i was spotted.

PopeDotNinja• 7 years ago

I just went on a Game of Thrones tour yesterday in Belfast, Northern Ireland (corny as heck, but fun if you enjoyed the show). I learned that they used trained ravens during the filming. One of the things they taught the ravens to do was simply hover over a giant fan used to provide lift. When they wanted to show a raven banking left or right, they'd simply have the crow hover & rotate the camera.

tannhaeuser2• 7 years ago

Crows are known to give "presents" to humans they like, such as dropping small pieces of metal they picked up, or worms. Also, crows have very rich tribal behaviours going on. There's a town close to mine called Husum (in North Germany) where there's a multi-year battle going on between crows in the park. You immediately notice it by the noise, and in fact by dead crows lying on the ground.

eps• 7 years ago

Cats tend to bring gifts too.

My grandmother used to receive that of dead moles, freshly caught mice and what have you, invariably placed dead center on her pillow. She wasn't a fan of that cat before, and she didn't like it much better after. No idea why.

sethammons2• 7 years ago

One theory I heard on cats leaving dead things for you is that they think of you as a non-effective cat that needs help killin things, similar to a mom cat teaching kittens to hunt.

elhudy• 7 years ago

Cats are responsible for killing up to 25 billion animals annually and have directly contributed to the extinction of at least 33 different species.

Growing up our family cat brought us a constant stream of rabbits, birds, and moles. It is actually a problem that nobody talks about, because cats are cute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife

jacobmoe• 7 years ago

My mother's cat used to carry live mice into the house and release them. He'd bat the stunned mouse around but not kill it. I would have to catch the mouse and bring it back outside. The exact opposite behavior you want from a cat.

Pigo• 7 years ago

I wonder if this kind of behavior is connected to the etymology of the term "murder of crows".

naravara• 7 years ago

Crows also eat carrion and listening to a bunch of them squawk all at once definitely sounds like they're a crowd at a colosseum demanding someone get killed.

MS902• 7 years ago

I remember reading a story a while back about a kid that threw rocks at a tree full of crows one day when he was walking to the school bus. After that day, the crows decided that this child was the enemy. Many kids walked past the tree on the way to the school bus every day and the crows completely ignored them, but when little rock thrower walked by he'd literally get shit bombed by 20-30 crows all the way to the bus. Every single day.

I guess they give presents to people the don't like also :)

derefr2• 7 years ago

I wonder if anyone’s ever done an experiment on the social connectivity of crows, by first somehow pissing off an entire flock of crows; and then tagging a particular individual crow, and repeatedly being friendly to/appeasing that crow, and seeing how long the it takes for the message that you’re not such a jerk after all to spread among the rest of the crow population.

abrodersen• 7 years ago

I've been to Husum! I and my family stayed there when we visited. I'm an American, but my ancestors emigrated from that area. It's a beautiful town and we were shown the utmost hospitality by both the people there and our distant relatives that live nearby.

tannhaeuser2• 7 years ago

"Brodersen" (if that's your family name) definitely wouldn't sound unfamiliar in Frisia.

burtonator2• 7 years ago

You immediately notice it by the noise, and in fact by dead crows lying on the ground.

We're not sure they're exactly mourning but crows have "funerals" ... it might also be that they're trying to ascertain why they died to avoid a potential threat.

... could be both too.

m4634• 7 years ago

They also battle hawks. If I ever hear a lot of commotion (crow-motion?) I frequently see a hawk in the midst of it getting driven off by dive bombing crows.

nickjj• 7 years ago

I was playing golf once and was standing around eating lunch next to my golf cart with a friend.

A crow swooped in, perched itself on the steering wheel of the golf cart, evaluated there was no food there but then took my wallet and flew away. I chased it for like 200 feet and it dropped my wallet ~5 feet from a large body of water, looked at me and flew away.

I'm pretty sure it did that out of spite for not feeding him.

ada1981• 7 years ago

I love Cheryl Crow!

gullywhumper• 7 years ago

Here's another article about crow intelligence and crows in Seattle [1]. Some interesting topics from the article include crows have 'funerals', they can recognize individual humans, individual crows commute to the same specific areas during the day to forage and return to concentrated roosts with other crows at end of the day.

Living in Minneapolis with a home office overlooking the Mississippi River, I've noticed crows commuting in the darker, colder months. Hundreds of them at a time go up river in the morning, just as it's getting light, and then return down river before the sun sets. It's fun to watch.

[1] https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2017/5/17/the-secret-lif...

rotexo• 7 years ago

In the East San Francisco bay area, I have observed that the crows behave in an incredibly habitual fashion. Every evening, huge crowds of them gather near Lake Merritt in Oakland. I see them streaming over my apartment in Berkeley a little before dusk. Some contingent flies north over my apartment around dawn. It seems like they disperse to forage during the day. I really wish I knew how they decided who gets what turf during the day. Do they select where they are going based on where their friends will be?

Sharlin4• 7 years ago

It seems like they disperse to forage during the day.

This is exactly what they do. They roost communally, with well-defined and enforced social hierarchies even in flocks hundreds of birds strong.

billsmithaustin• 7 years ago

How crows end up running all the tobacco companies: https://www.crowdedcities.com/

Fiahil• 7 years ago

I love good articles about crows, and even more stories about them in the comments! Please, don't hesitate to share!

amelius• 7 years ago

So they are at a top of the food chain, like us?

harimau7774• 7 years ago

Not directly related, but some other bird behaviors that I find fascinating:

Shrike (A.K.A. butcher birds) are predatory but since they are song birds they don't have talons to rip apart prey into manageable bites. Instead they impale their pray on thorns or barbed wire so that they can tear off bits with their beaks. They also use this to store food and have been known to use this to wait until the poison in certain insects degrades. During mating season, the number of carcasses that a male shrike has hung up is used to demonstrate its fitness to females.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpRcc5jvRmQ

Killdeer nest on the ground, so when a predator approaches the nest the mother attempts to lead them away by pretending to have a broken wing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJTt5I8K4Rk

yawgmoth• 7 years ago

Shrike birds always remind me of the Shrike from Hyperion [1]. I guess the real thing inspired the character's thorny exterior.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hyperion+shrike&ia=images&iax=imag...

npongratz• 7 years ago

The thorny exterior, as well as the character's propensity for impaling its victims on the Tree of Thorns and letting them hang there for eternity.

ahmedaly• 7 years ago

It's interesting that in Qur'an 1400 yrs ago, it mentioned that the crow guided Adam's son to burying his brother after he killed him.

Adam is the father of all humans according to Islamic beliefs and his son killed his brother.

hsnewman• 7 years ago

I really dislike misleading headlines, so it could, or could not, right? This says nothing.

mcv3• 7 years ago

Does the title really fit the article? The article discusses how smart crows are. It doesn't compare them in any way to other smart non-primates like elephants, cetaceans and cephalopods. Of course their tool use is a pretty big deal, but it's not the only aspect of intelligence. Squids have shown to be amazing problem solvers too.

By the way, a while back I read that the tool-using crows of New Caledonia had their eyes more to the front than other crows, and someone used that to discover that another group of crows (on Hawaii I think) also used tools.

(edit: rephrased the last bit to make it more clear)

gerbilly3• 7 years ago

a group of crows (on Hawaii I think) also used tools.

You're thinking of the New Caledonian crows.

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000161-1f5...

mcv3• 7 years ago

The New Caledonian crows are the original group of tool using crows that's already widely publicised. The more recently discovered group is indeed from Hawaii.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-cro...

Strom• 7 years ago

Indeed, it's more about the specifics of crows and less about relative comparison.

Crows are clever beyond tools, but tool using isn't that exclusive and can even be found in fish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KKjqXxxp-Q

ssijak• 7 years ago

At my parents house crows pickup wallnuts, then fly to some altitude and drop them on the concrete to break them and eat them. Only problem is the dog who waits for them to drop the walnuts and eat them himself.

johnstonnorth• 7 years ago

One of my favourite quotes:

"To a clever crow, a scarecrow is an opportunity" - Alan Scott

(but he in turn may have been quoting someone else)

ivanhoe• 7 years ago

As a kid I loved watching hooded crows breaking snails' shells by picking up a snail, flying a 10 or so feet up into the air and then throwing the snail against a narrow stone path in the park. I've never seen even one crow making a mistake to throw a snail on the soft grass on either side of the path, they would aways carefully aim for the snail to hit the hard surface - which means it wasn't just an act of imitation, each of them perfectly understood the idea behind what they were doing.

gerbilly3• 7 years ago

Crows are pretty imaginative and playful.

For example, see this video of a crow tobogganing on a snowy roof.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dWw9GLcOeA

ralf07• 7 years ago

Once I was sitting on a bench under a walnut tree and a walnut fell to the pavement near me and got cracked. I thought it fell from the tree and picked it up and ate it. Suddenly a crow appeared and started screaming and flying around me. I suspect the walnut didn't drop from a tree but it was the crow who throw it to crack it open. I said sorry, but it kept cursing :(, so I quickly left.

PhaedrusV• 7 years ago

Glancing through the headers I read that as "Cows could be..."

imvetri• 7 years ago

Watch and learn. - All animals are good at it. Man made world - A smart mans survival strategy so that he can sit back and relax for his future. But, another criminal monkey looks and thinks "Oh I can make money out of it"

Creates life hard for other human beings.

Whats survival in this man's world - "Learn what other human had created, because whole crowd is following."

wait a minute. Crows smarter than humans? Of course they are. They dont load bullshit in their head.

iambrj• 7 years ago

tldr: study suggests crows recognize human faces

ChuckMcM• 7 years ago

Easiest animal the general public can interact with. In my area they will really try to do what you want, if they can figure it out, for cashews :-).

I have tried different ways to train them to bring me hobby drones or their parts. I figured it would make for a cheap defense against random drone surveillance.

danmostudco• 7 years ago

Crows are astoundingly intelligent. If you're having a slow day, a quick youtube of "crows solving puzzles" yields some great videos of them solving complicated tasks like water displacement to reach food[0]. I believe raccoons share this achievement.

Additionally, there was a thread on here some time ago[1] by a Dutch Startup[2] about trying to teach crows to exchange cigarette butts for treats inside a tiny device place in parks, I always thought that was a funny idea if you could get the crows to teach one another.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368

[2] http://www.thecrowbox.com/

senectus1• 7 years ago

the crows in western Australia know how to open a kids school bag (zip or buttons or both). then they know to pull the lunch box out and open that (clasps, zipped even to pop the vacuum button before popping off the lid). So now the kids have to keep their school bags in the room.

avgeek23• 7 years ago

My neighbour has a fancy Persian munchkin cat everytime she comes out on the apartment balcony all the crows from the neighborhood gather at the tree in front of our building and watch her until she leaves.

kylek• 7 years ago

What makes us think that they aren't smarter than primates?

xpatrikh• 7 years ago

I found a related article on an other site today "A Dutch Startup Wants to Train Crows to Pick Up Cigarette Butts" that seems to use the crow box.

http://www.thecrowbox.com/

MisterOctober• 7 years ago

In Marijn Haverbeke's "Eloquent Javascript," there's a great section describing how crows employ termite mounds to create information relay networks -- remarkable stuff

hiruxxv• 7 years ago

how to weight loss

francisofascii• 7 years ago

Related: The Crow and the Pitcher, one of Aesop's fables. Apparently it has been known for some time crows were resourceful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_and_the_Pitcher

danschumann• 7 years ago

I like to think about what would happen on a planet where the most intelligent species wasn't from a primate, but another animal. Can you imagine the societal nuances that a planet of human-level-intelligent crows? What kind of sitcoms they'd have? I mean most tv revolves around sex.. so having eggs and nests would change all their social taboos. How different would "Sex and the City" be if it was crows? So crazy.

AdmiralAsshat• 7 years ago

For more on crows' ability to remember human faces, see:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/bird-brains-crows-re...

NOTE: I can't find confirmation in the article or in the referenced study, but I could've sworn when I initially heard this story years ago, the "threatening" mask worn was a Nixon mask. Perhaps that was a later embellishment.

methehack• 7 years ago

I remember this story from a few years ago: "the girl who gets gifts from birds"

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026

Searching for the story just now, I came across this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/lawsuit-...

Apparently they were sued by neighbors for encouraging wild life or something.

What an odd pair of stories. One so uplifting; the other a downer from the opposite perspective. Zeitgeisty!

dang• 7 years ago

The upper was discussed here in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9112145

bshanks• 7 years ago

The article mentions that corvids don't have a "neocortex", which is true, however many believe that there is a part of avian brains which is their version of neocortex (see e.g. https://www.pnas.org/content/112/11/3184 ). So it's possible that the neural architecture of their intelligence is somewhat similar to ours after all.

jboy55• 7 years ago

In highschool I worked at a pet food store, around 1pm everyday someone would drive behind our store dropping pet food to feed the crows. A neighbour thought we were doing it and was really upset, telling us they hated the crows and all the noise they made.

Anyhow, a week or two later, I heard all the crows in the back and heard a loud 'bang'. I thought the neighbour had grabbed a shotgun and shot a crow, so I went out back to investigate. After looking around I saw that a crow laid dead next to a power transformer up on a telephone pole.

At first there was one other crow cawing loudly. Then more and more crows showed up. They took turns flying up and pecking at the dead crow. Within an hour, there was probably 100 crows, in all the trees, powerlines and on apartment buildings nearby. It really impressed on me how social crows were, obviously the 'caw'ing was such that it called all the crows, and crows much have told other crows as well. You could almost say they were mourning the crow or perhaps learning how this one crow died.

It would be really interesting examining the communication patterns of crows, they have such control over their voice, they must be able to do some complex communication.

cwkoss2• 7 years ago

When I lived in a second floor apartment, I trained the crows to sit on a particular spot of the fence below my balcony.

First, I would just throw nuts for them (they liked cashews best). Then, I gradually shaped their behavior by only throwing nuts when they were standing on then fence, then eventually only when they were standing on a particular spot of the fence.

Took about 3 months, was pretty fun.

Then, they started cawing to ask for nuts. They were in the right spot, why wasn't I coming out onto the balcony to give nuts? Had to ignore them for a while to avoid reinforcing their habit of demanding. Crows have no concept of weekend mornings being sacred sleep-in time and I didn't want to piss off the neighbors.

I'd like to train crows again, but I'm not sure of a good way to avoid them becoming demanding again. Also, they were much more comfortable picking up nuts when I was stuck on balcony, they seem fairly wary when offered food on the same level as a human.

musiccog• 7 years ago

We made friends with a lorikeet (parrot) we named 'Percy' 11 years ago, our first one. Him and his 'wife' (we named her 'Cruella' for obvious reasons) stayed with him for years. We then have had - and contining now - years of their offspring. Names are hard to find with so many offspring - But 'Buttons' is Percys' great-grand son, and is still here today with us. When I moved in 15 years ago, there was none of this. Now, we have a grand colalition of Magpies (corvids), Lorikeets and King Parrots that protect each other, and keep us busy if not entertained every day.

lainga• 7 years ago

Can I address the raven in the room here? How are corvids' future descendants going to use tools? Beaks? Standing on one foot? Re-evolution of articulation in the wings?

lekda• 7 years ago

In france we have an amusement park that have dressed crow to pick up left over butt. They are doing quite a good job.

nikofeyn• 7 years ago

that’s a bad assumption that primates are the second most intelligent animal. i am personally convinced that dolphins, in particular orcas, a much smarter than any primate species.

orcas are almost always left out of intelligence of animals discussions, but they have a very refined intelligence that doesn’t require leaps of faith to say, woah, that is very high level cognition going on.

at least the article includes this quote:

Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche

5etho• 7 years ago

What a wholesome thread :-)

sprflyprgrmrguy• 7 years ago

How do I go about gaining the trust of the local murder of crows? We've a group of them that hang around, and they do an great job of scaring off the 3-4 red tail hawks in the neighborhood too... we've got chickens, and I'd love to trade some aerial protection for food.

guru4consulting• 7 years ago

In Southern parts of India (at least in Tamilnadu state), there are lots of rituals involving crows. It's very common to see people calling crows (giving the cawing sound) and feeding them food on Saturdays. It is also believed that when people die, their soul supposedly comes back to visit the family as a crow, hence they feed the crows especially on the death anniversaries of family members. When visitors come to your home, the crows often inform the residents well ahead by cawing in-front of the home. I used to make fun of my Mom for believing in all such random events, saying crows are just stupid birds habituated to getting fed by humans and don't remember anything. Now that I see that crows can be smarter, I could have been wrong.

newshorts• 7 years ago

I kidnapped a baby crow thinking it was injured. My neighbor helped me capture it as the crow parents were honking at us from the trees.

At the animal clinic, i learned it couldn’t fly because it was a baby, not due to an injury, so i offered to reunite it with its parents.

The minute i released the baby, the parents flew over and started barking. It seemed almost like they were trying to guide the baby away from me.

For the rest of the summer the crows would yell at my neighbor and I if they saw us.

That fall, I was walking my newborn outside and was dive bombed by one of the crows. I got the sense it was payback for kidnapping the baby crow.

They hold grudges.

aagd• 7 years ago

speaking of skills: https://twitter.com/Prokaryota/status/1132744852129636353?s=...

Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

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