A girl who gets gifts from birds

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026?fb_ref=Default

by th0br0 • 11 years ago

506 136 11 years ago

right2roam• 11 years ago

I had a gift this morning, from a pigeon, onto my shoulder whilst waiting for the train to pull into the platform for work.

Supposed to be lucky - not sure for me or the pigeon though!

madaxe_again• 11 years ago

This is cool, but isn't that surprising, if you think about the behaviours of other species, and that corvids as a whole are highly intelligent and use tools in a fashion akin to primates.

I mean, primates give gifts to each other and humans, and my cat loves nothing more than to leave the most succulent bits of viscera of whatever her prey was for me on Persian rugs, for me to enjoy, by which I mean tread on while heading to the shower in the morning.

canjobear• 11 years ago

I think it is very surprising even given findings about corvid intelligence. I know of studies showing crows can count, but that kind of intelligence does not at all imply that a creature will spontaneously give gifts in exchange for food. This requires either some kind of ethics including reciprocity, or it requires that the crows reason that giving gifts will make someone more likely to give more food. The latter reasoning requires that the crows are able to model the behavior of an intelligent agent under hypothetical circumstances.

Bird brains are very different from mammal brains; they don't have a neocortex. So it's very interesting that they have developed similar gift-giving behavior to mammals and primates.

gadders• 11 years ago

I think a lot of our intelligence research is mammal-biassed. When we think of intelligent animals we think primates, dolphins, dogs and maybe pigs.

We ignore birds and octopus.

Lewton3• 11 years ago

Crow flies with thing in its beak. Sees food, drops thing, grabs food. Comes back later, sees more food! Assumes food came from dropping thing (See "Superstition in the pigeon" [0]). Meme spreads among the crows.

No ethics or deep reasoning required. Random rewards lead to irrational behavior.

[0] http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Skinner/Pigeon/

protonfish• 11 years ago

Reciprocity is possibly the simplest form of cooperation. All that would be required is the ability to distinguish between individuals and this type of social behavior could appear through simple Pavlovian conditioning.

svankmajer• 11 years ago

Good heavens. My cats sometimes do things like that, but I always thought that it was all about passing down hunting wisdom and not much about gifts or gratitude.

mxfh• 11 years ago

There already exists an automated exploit for this behavior:

Joshua Klein's Crow Machine: https://www.josh.is/crow-machine/

im3w1l• 11 years ago

I think there is a big difference between gift and payment.

Your article is on skinnerian conditioning to train crows to pay for peanuts.

In this article the crows got peanuts whether they gave gifts or not. They just decided to give gifts. No training occured.

jmilloy• 11 years ago

Clearly, they're the same crows.

autechr3• 11 years ago

Perhaps in the mind of the crows, they are giving gifts as a reward. In effect, training the human (in the article).

vinceguidry• 11 years ago

That only proves how smart crows are, they can both participate in an economy and operate on a gifting basis.

lloydde• 11 years ago

I stopped being mesmerized by TED talks after reading http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRE... . I was further disappointed that the Ted talk webpage was not updated after that development.

dchichkov• 11 years ago

Er. So does it work or not on wild crows? This article implies that the study on wild crows hadn't been done.

Panoramix• 11 years ago

How does TED fits in all of this?

lotsofmangos5• 11 years ago

Paying crows peanuts to 'find' money has to be the best business plan ever. This could be bigger than Apple.

qohen• 11 years ago

Crowsourcing!

davidgerard• 11 years ago

"We have discovered an intelligent being ... we must TROLL IT!"

sebthomas• 11 years ago

Thought it read 'get lifts from birds' - disappointed.

profinger• 11 years ago

Anyone else experiencing difficulties with the bbc site?

rickdale2• 11 years ago

On one of David Attenborough's recent shows, he said that crows can store up 30,000 pieces of food in various locations in the ground. They not only know where each piece of food is, but they know which ones are perishable and to get the food before it spoils. Pretty remarkable if you ask me.

maxerickson2• 11 years ago

More here:

http://www.pbs.org/lifeofbirds/brain/

The particular bird matching that number, Clark's Nutcracker, looks well studied. This paper discusses them caching 30,000 seeds, but not in 30,000 separate locations, it concludes that they locate at least 1,000 locations by memory:

http://www.auburn.edu/academic/classes/biol/7560/folkerts/hu...

(that author seems to have done much field work studying the bird)

Another paper estimates that they might cache 90,000 seeds.

Luc• 11 years ago

The paper you linked to mentions them caching seeds in all manner of different locations. I wonder if they have some form of algorithm unknown to us to determine a good location, rather than choosing randomly. That would aid a lot in 'remembering' locations of the caches.

WickyNilliams• 11 years ago

Another David Attenborough moment on crows [0]. Some crows in Japan have worked out how to crack nuts whose shell is too difficult for them to open themselves...

At a pedestrian crossing, drop the nuts onto road and wait for it to get run over. Then wait for light to turn red and traffic to stop, then pick up the opened nut.

How many leaps of thought would it take to arrive at such a system? Observing patterns of traffic, understanding the nut is not truly impenetrable but that they are too weak themselves, understanding that pressure/weight greater than they can apply will release the nut from the shell etc. It's incredibly clever!

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p007xvww

sdfjkl• 11 years ago

Crows are incredibly smart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY8-gP3Sw_8

tomswartz07• 11 years ago

There's an old 4Chan thread where a user starts 'World War Crow' by favoring a certain group of crows over another.

Allegedly, after some time, the two groups of crows have an all out battle over which group gets french fries.

http://usvsth3m.com/post/69700674556/has-an-anonymous-4chan-...

silveira• 11 years ago

True or not, this story is amazing.

klipt• 11 years ago

Reminds me of http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=59

Zuider• 11 years ago

Yeah, you have to be careful to share the goods evenly among corvids. If you favor one individual, it can be exiled, or even attacked and killed by the others. A crow that is good at getting your attention rises in status if you make sure that there is enough to go around for the group.

api• 11 years ago

Maybe some group of aliens distributed oil and other valuable minerals unevenly across the Earth, and now they're watching and laughing and running betting pools.

comrade1• 11 years ago

What!? That's not the end though. There was a second part where the crow factions fight.

I hope someone saved it!

fheisler• 11 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/o30vTqq.png

thekevan• 11 years ago

I was disappointed that this article didn't include a definite scientific opinion on whether the crows saw this as an exchange for food, or if for some reason they bring objects to a feeding area.

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

crows leave gifts for one another. This may be some variant of that, triggered by the food?

shutupalready• 11 years ago

Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."

Why wouldn't they put this video in the BBC article?

kbenson2• 11 years ago

They may not have kept it. The camera system may keep a certain amount of prior footage that is automatically flushed at a certain age, or that the users clean out when it gets large. This is recounting a story from a few weeks ago.

discardorama2• 11 years ago

A lot of people refuse to believe that animals (or birds) can show any kind of advanced thinking. "Oh, the crow was probably carrying something in its beak; it saw the peanut, and dropped the thing in its beak" is their explanation. I'm sorry, but animals are far more perceptive than they're given credit for.

Also, how do you explain this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5NuBk5_Izc

Varcht2• 11 years ago

I blame this on the "DreamWorks Effect", animators have done such a good job giving animals human traits and emotions that millinials+ really can't help but be animists.

tbrake• 11 years ago

I used to have a similar theory but personification of animals has been a part of human storytelling since the beginning of time.

I'm just unsure if modern CGI is any more compelling in forming lasting notions of animism than, say, Bambi was.

nsxwolf• 11 years ago

Confused... you're saying that the crow in the video is not playing with the object? What other interpretation is there? It's not an instinctual nest building activity to go sledding on a foreign object, is it?

I'm a Gen-Xer, and I think that crow is sledding for fun.

discardorama2• 11 years ago

Conversely, I think Christians (for one) do not like the idea of animals having "human traits", because it goes against their core mythology, which says that God created man in His image. If animals also started showing human traits, then Man isn't so special anymore, is he?

Edited: I'm being downvoted, but this was the exact reasoning given to me by a rather devout Christian; and it seemed to make sense. I'm agnostic, btw.

quadrangle• 11 years ago

bullshit. Perhaps you don't understand that crows use tools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg and that they also are social and communicate with each other. They do give gifts to each other as part of courtship. We don't need to anthropomorphize to recognize plain facts about crows being intelligent and intentional and social.

lotsofmangos5• 11 years ago

The idea that humans do not share emotive traits with other animals would seem very unlikely, given what we know of the theory of evolution, observed animal behavior and neurology.

Also, you may want to have a look at The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness that was published for the Francis Crick memorial conference at Cambridge University.

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConscious...

http://fcmconference.org/

aaron6952• 11 years ago

It is funny that the OP, with a good point, gives an example of exactly why people are stupid and anthropomorphize animals, sure that crow is skiing.....

Which is a shame since the opposite is also true, animals can have emotions and intelligence. Just it's doesn't necessarily look the same as humans characteristics.

"DreamWorks Effect" millinials+ sorry but I don't think you could be more wrong.

Disney has being doing this since the 40/50's.

Bambi, Dumbo, Disney nature docos were awful, even David Attenborough who improved the situation vastly is also guilty.

It is at least the post WW2 generation.

okasaki• 11 years ago

He thought, he judged, as animals can be seen to do, if observed without prejudice. I must say here, since it has to be said somewhere about Hugo, that I think the series of comments automatically evoked by this kind of statement, the ticker-tape remarks to do with anthropomorphism’ are beside the point. Our emotional life is shared with the animals; we flatter ourselves that human emotions are so much more complicated than theirs. Perhaps the only emotion not known to a cat or a dog is -romantic love. And even then, we have to wonder. What is the emotional devotion of a dog for his master or mistress but something like that sort of love, all pining and yearning and ‘give me, give me’. What was Hugo’s love for Emily but that? As for our thoughts, our intellectual apparatus, our rationalisms and our logics and our deductions and so on, it can be said with absolute certainty that dogs and cats and monkeys cannot make a rocket to fly to the moon or weave artificial dress materials out of the by-products of petroleum, but as we sit in the ruins of this variety of intelligence, it is hard to give it much value: I suppose we are undervaluing it now as we over-valued it then. It will have to find its place: I believe a pretty low place, at that.

- Doris Lessing

codeduck• 11 years ago

I had a pet crow when I was about 6 years old - he was a fledgeling who'd left his nest on the hottest day of the year and was dehydrated. My brother and I were squirting eachother with water and he cawed at us until we squirted him. He decided this was the best thing ever, and basically adopted us from then onwards.

He was the terror of the local cats and dogs, but left our two siamese alone because he knew they were part of the family. He'd regularly steal visitor's keys, and hide them in the bush alongside our house purely so he could watch my dad or mum have to hunt for them. He'd play in the sprinkler, and knew the sound of my dad's motorcycle - when he heard my dad coming home in the evenings he would fly down the street and perch on my dad's shoulder for the ride home.

Crows are awesome.

drobati• 11 years ago

I've always heard that crows are incredibly smart. Great story. :)

wozniacki• 11 years ago

Crows are incredibly smart.

They are known to memorize curbside garbage pick up routes of city vehicles and the specific days for each neighborhood, within a city. They are also quick to adapt, given a change in schedule and only visit those specific neighborhoods only on those specific days, from miles away.

Here's a video of crow performing a multi-step tool action test - a test of intelligence - for the first time, without guidance and solving it in the first attempt.

[1] Crow Intelligence - Multi-Step Tool Action Test

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY8-gP3Sw_8

yawz• 11 years ago

Great story, indeed.

DAddYE• 11 years ago

Similar story, ~10 years ago a friend's dad (a hunter) found this crow alone and starving (he was probably 1 month old). He gave it to me. I feed him for 1/2 months and instead to leave him in a cage I decided to let him living outside... free.

He was super smart, he was able to recognize me he was playful but the thing that most surprised me was that he was really lovable he really liked to be petted and every time I was on my way home from school he would fly down on my shoulder and start to rub my cheeks happy to see me like a dog would.

Like a dog every time I called him within a minute or so he would fly down on my shoulder or arm everywhere from my small town. It was a powerful sensation!

One day that didn't happen. Indeed I was deeply sad. I thought he died ceasing cats or rats.

Around a month later I was driving home while from the windows of my car I started to see several crows flying very close to my car.

I stopped the car when suddenly something like 15/20 crows landed in front of me.

I'm not good in recognize crows especially at night but I suspect my crow found his crew and wanted to let me know he was fine. Maybe a proper goodbye?

I went home with a huge smile, I was a lover of birds, I had several of them, within years I totally stopped to buy them because I think a bird should be free to fly.

Crows are awesome.

cmstoken• 11 years ago

Agreed, crows are super awesome.

Udo2• 11 years ago

Whenever someone asserts that mammalian-equivalent intelligence is incredibly unlikely to arise twice, I like to point towards very intelligent and social birds, like crows - who are capable of performing advanced mental feats without a neocortex.

metaphorm• 11 years ago

nature rarely does anything just once. if it can happen once it can almost certainly happen more than once, and almost certainly does happen more than once.

Udo2• 11 years ago

In case it wasn't clear from my comment: that was my point. I agree with you.

Balgair• 11 years ago

Avian neuroscience is actually pretty cool. Our neocortex is made up of 6 layers of cell bodies, with interconnections and projections to other parts of the brain and body. The avian brain, however, is not divided into layers, but is more like the brainstem, in the sense that it's a lot of nuclei and bulbous areas called the nidopallium and mesopallium. The songbirds are well studied, if you want to do some research, as we the vocalizations are easier to measure and mess with. Mind that crows, though very smart for birds, as still nowhere near us humans or our close friends, the dog or pig. It still seems that the neocortex and many other factors have beaten the corvid brain to civilization and are, at least in this environment, better suited for higher intelligence.

Good starter articles on corvid intelligence are:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626540/

http://academic.reed.edu/biology/professors/srenn/pages/teac...

bshanks• 11 years ago

Tangentially, there is recent discussion of the idea that the neocortex is homologous to structures that do exist in the avian forebrain, eg that mammalian neocortex vs avian forebrain is almost the same processing units, wired with almost the same way connectivity, but just with a slightly different spatial organization:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212... Harvey J. Karten. Neocortical Evolution: Neuronal Circuits Arise Independently of Lamination.

Some evidence is that some genes which correlate with cortical layers in mammals show up in these other places in avians.

hackaflocka2• 11 years ago

Hoaxes involving children and/or their magical gifts: http://tempr.org/54ef57337b951.html

MollyR4• 11 years ago

thanks for this, its a good reminder to be skeptical.

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

None of those seem relevant or even related to this story, except inasmuch as they involve a child.

adamnemecek2• 11 years ago

a.) there are no gifts involved in the stories you posted

b.) it seems like the bbc witnessed the gift-giving

hackaflocka2• 11 years ago

Hoaxes involving the BBC found from 30 seconds of Googling: http://tempr.org/54ef79520a0bc.html

Crito• 11 years ago

On the other hand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taung_Child

sprkyco• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5_DuZ8WuMM Saw this video a while back and was really quite amazed the process adopted to crack walnuts. After watching that video I definitely had a higher level of "respect" for animals and their intellect.

minikites• 11 years ago

Crows are real smart. On an episode of Roderick on the Line, John Roderick recalled a story he read where a researcher was trying to round up crows for tests. He went into a parking lot and tossed a net, capturing some. The next day, he went to a different parking lot across town and the crows immediately flew away when he pulled in, because they recognized him. He went back to the same second parking lot in a different vehicle and was able to capture some, but then that vehicle didn't work. He started wearing masks and trying all sorts of tricks, but as far as he could tell, the crows were communicating through town.

ham• 11 years ago

Regularly, I'd walk in a park near my workplace to work out problems and I began too often to play games and tricks with the magpies (another type of Corvid like the crow). I'd do things like throwing twigs on either side of them to see how they would react (no magpies ever injured!). After a while I'm certain the magpies had a particular warning call any one would call out when I arrived in the park that would set them all of making that cawking sound until I left. After a while I needed to avoid the park for a bit and I think I was forgiven when I slowly started integrating myself in by leaving bits of food like nuts.

I was amazed too at how observant they were, keeping a different distance if they noticed I had am umbrella or something in my hand or if I was walking funny.

The magpie is the only bird to pass the mirror test: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_magpie#Intelligence

pakled_engineer• 11 years ago

David Suzuki did an interesting show about crows but of course due to annoying geoIP copyright can't find an American version to link.

http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/m/episodes/a-murder-of-crow...

There's signs up at some Indian public markets forbidding vendors taking payment from monkeys as they watched humans exchange cash for fruit and became pickpockets. No gifts though except a huge tip when handing over piles of notes for one bunch of bananas.

nkurz• 11 years ago

Here's a more scientific look at the behavior:

John Marzluff & Tony Angell: Gifts of the Crow (2012)

Video: https://archive.org/details/scm-67314-johnmarzlufftonyangell...

Book: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Gifts-of-the-Crow/John-Mar...

yoshizar• 11 years ago

Konrad Lorez, one of the founders of the field of animal behavior and a Nobel laurete, did a lot of his research on jackdaws, which are a close relative of the crow. His book King Solomon's Ring is a really enjoyable read into his insights about their intelligence and social life.

codyb• 11 years ago

For anyone interested in psychology in general, his text "On Aggression" is an amazingly well developed read on the habits of aggression starting with fish, then birds, then eventually mammals (concluding of course with humans).

The final explanation of why a loving father of four can firebomb a city filled with innocent people blew my mind as a younger man and shaped my worldview.

I think I'll add King Solomon's Ring to my amazon cart now.

Cheers for reminding me of him.

bane• 11 years ago

When I was quite young I lived in a low-end apartment complex, not quite "the projects" but home to lots of new immigrants working multiple jobs, lots of latchkey kids, that sort of thing.

From time to time birds would fly into the building and those that survived usually needed some place to recuperate a bit. I became well known in the neighborhood as "the bird boy" for my seemingly miraculous ability to nurse stunned birds back to health...several of the other kids in the neighborhood tried it as well, but they ended up killing all their birds.

For a while I had a pet robin, too young to fly. He had fallen from his nest and was abandoned after that. I took him in and fed and raised him till eventually turning him over to a local animal sanctuary. While I had him, for all that time, I had a friend on my shoulder or head pretty much wherever I went. He knew who my family was and who my friends were, and would stay away from people he didn't know. He knew where I kept his food and the process I had to go through the make it ready for him to eat.

I don't recall ever being pooped on by him, not even once. He'd hold it till I put him in his house, or up on a branch while out playing with my friends. He never bit me, or did anything aggressive towards me. But he'd misbehave with other people he didn't know.

One day, in a well meaning attempt to set him free, my mother dropped me off from school and then dropped my bird off in the woods. I came home and couldn't find him, my mother lied and said that he had flown away (which I knew was patently false). Finally, out of guilt, my mother fessed up and I ran out to the woods where she had dropped him off.

He had waited patiently all day for me and vigorously hopped towards me when he saw me coming, chirping his head off in angry protest. He was shivering and starving and getting him back home, warm and fed was the guiltiest I ever felt.

Not a crow, but definitely a cool experience with wild birds.

beefman• 11 years ago

Url should be simplified to http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026

gandy2• 11 years ago

Give and receive. This is some support for the idea that the law of reciprocity is ingrained fundamentally in us, even to lower form species like birds.

gandy2• 11 years ago

Give and receive. This is support that the law of reciprocity might be ingrained in us--evident even in lower form species like birds.

marcusgarvey• 11 years ago

At what point do we start calling them "people"?

ChrisNorstrom• 11 years ago

I pissed off crows and they punished me for 2 weeks.

My uncivilized hooligan former neighbors had a young tree in their yard which they purposely allowed to grow for years right in the foundation of our brick wall. It started casting a shadow in our garden as well. There were no nests in the 20 foot young tree and the property was abandoned and now owned by the bank. So I ran over and cut it down. It was big enough to start cracking the foundation.

Big mistake, I should have worn a disguise. The crows who live in the tree above the one I cut took saw this as vandalism (well it technically was). For 2 weeks they would poop on my car non-stop. Only my car. They knew the PT Cruiser was mine, they shat all over that car. They specifically aimed for the door handle on the driver's side. I have never seen such vengeful birds and such nasty bird crap. It was discussing. They'd carpet bomb it all day, every day, for 2 weeks. I would have about 14 bird crap splatters on the car on any given day. They finally stopped after about 2 weeks.

I should have had a neighbor do it or worn a disguise.

ajtaylor• 11 years ago

Looks like the crows' intelligence can go both ways! I suspect that your disguise would not have fooled them though. I've watched some amazing feats of Crow problem solving (thanks Sir David Attenborough!) so they probably would have just watched which house you went into and carpet bombed ALL the cars in the driveway.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

You know what? After spending hours reading comments here, then watching videos and a talk about crows, it's decided. Screw drones. I don't want a quadcopter. I want to befriend a few crows and see if I can convince some to do cool stuff.

sounds• 11 years ago

As someone who has worked a LOT with drones of all form factors (quad copters, propeller drones, battery and dead dinosaur-fueled), when drones can do this, drones will be cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eakKfY5aHmY

Context:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon#Ecology_and_be...

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

I remember that video. It was featured in a TED talk I very like [0]. Murmuration is one of the most amazing things I ever saw on YouTube. Thanks for reminding me of it.

[0] http://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_th...

A girl who gets gifts from birds

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