One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something.
It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the sidewalk, a pretty sizable rock smacked the pavement next to me, seemingly out of nowhere. If it had hit my head I would have been hurt. I finally look up and see a big crow staring directly down at me - it had dropped it from the power lines, it had seemingly been intentional, maybe as a warning, I don't know. I attributed it to malice towards the vagrants that harass them.
I was amazed at how much intelligence it would take to 1) form a grudge 2) form intent to threaten/harm, 3) formulate a plan using a weapon with cause -> effect to execute intent, 4) wait for opportunity.
I have observed a lot of very intelligent behaviors from these birds but that was the wildest one. I have seen it happen once since, so I'm convinced it isn't an accident.
Crows in country will wait for a newborn deer to be left alone in a field by their mothers shortly after birth to peck the baby's eyes out so it dies and the crow can eat it later. My neighbor had told me about this happening, and maybe a month later I saw a fawn with its eyes pecked out shortly after it had died. The doe just sat at the edge of the field by it all night. So sad, but really smart of the crows.
Crows have also been known to alert predators like wolves to easy prey so they can pick the remains.
I remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least crows, which the article was focusing on).
In other words, they seem to achieve better results with smaller brains than we thought. And yes, crows (in EU) do exhibit some pretty intelligent behavior.
I've read there's also a social aspect - crows are extremely social creatures, as are humans, and other highly intelligent animals like whales. That does seem to be a common denominator.
Regarding that, I'm reminded of another story - on my daily walk near work, there was a dead crow on the pavement. 5 or so crows were standing all around it, doing nothing really. Even me passing close by did not trigger them to fly away or anything, it seemed like they were standing watch on the body. The next day, it was still there, same thing. The 3rd day, it was gone, but the crows were still standing watch in the same manner. I didn't know what to make of it other than it appeared they were mourning or taking part in some type of ingroup ritual. I didn't see it again after that, but it struck me.
I'm not an expert in the area but have read a bunch on this topic to try and understand it better. Bird brains and human brains are structured very differently. Birds are much more like GPUs with independent distributed processing happening in parallel. Mammals have these big bidirectional layers where signals are constantly propagating up and down in a big connected computation.
It could simply be an evolutionary "discovery", with no particular advantage over our "brain model". Evolution doesn't seek out optima; it simply encourages genetic structures that improve odds of reproductive success.
Or, to put it another way: if corvid genetics happened upon a brain type that promoted their survival, it doesn't matter if it was "better" or "worse" than the path the monkey/hominid brains took. Genetics took the first bus going in that direction.
They plan pretty deeply - if you think about things like plastic lid snowboarding, or cup sorting games (fit the smaller cups inside the larger) and those types of puzzles, there's usually an abstract reward, whether it's fun, play, revenge, or some future food or whatnot. They tease other animals, will play fetch, demonstrate a rich emotional inner life, and all of those things can be motivations for their complex plans. Throw in familial loyalty, social dynamics, interactions with humans, and it's a recipe for glorious chaos. There's a lot more going on that doesn't cleanly map to most people's conception of birds.
I've seen crows pick up walnuts and drop them in front of moving cars so the tires will open them. I had heard that they will do that, but it was still something to see it happen.
Wonderful timing. Me and my daughter just started to feed and befriend a crow in our backyard. We started by putting out a few pieces of cat foot, shaking the plastic container and tapping on the table we put it on to signal to the crow we had put out food. Within only 2 days the crow has learned to come and swoop down for his meal within just a minute or two after he does his normal fly-by passes. Now only about 5 days in, and we have the crow coming right down to eat as we put out the food, not much of a care that we are there.
My daughter wants to start training it to bring trinkets or coins so that is probably next on the agenda.
One thing I didn’t not really account for is that now in the morning when I step outside our new friend really lays on the noises of excitement as he knows a meal is about to be served.
And the just released “Palaces of The Crow” by Ray Nayler. I just finished it — really moving but also a brutal read in parts (c.f. because of what humans will do to each other not crows)
> In Ray Nayler's speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl.
Equipping cats and dogs with talking buttons (see, for example, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBh-BXgsO9IjhN-thTLvm... or https://www.youtube.com/@floundercat) has shown me there is a lot more going in their little heads than I suspected. There are examples of cats describing their dreams, or worrying about what will happen in the future, or theorizing about the nature of the world (in a very naive way).
Birds have higher neural density than mammals (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113) so can pack a lot into their tiny heads. I do wonder what they'd have to say, if given the chance.
I would be wary of extrapolating too much from the talking buttons. Review the clever hans effect and (the critiques of) Koko the gorilla for examples of people misattributing classical conditioning for intentionality.
The fact is that humans are exceedingly quick to find patterns in random data (e.g. horescopes, any form of divination), and that tendency gets amplified when the opportunity to anthropomorphize a cute animal is presented.
I started doing this with my cat. It's easy to try to explain away the underlying thought processes as coincidental association, and some of that is certainly true, but experiencing it first hand with a cat you know well is certainly different. My cat presses a button for his name when he wants attentions, buttons for outside, food, water. A button for YouTube (the startup sound), since he likes watching other cats and critter videos and nature documentaries on there. I was working in the other room during a stormy day and he was watching some nature video when I heard him repeatedly pressing the YouTube button and his name. But he was already watching it? When I went out there, I saw there was a video playing with a cat that looked almost exactly like him on the screen. He seemed extremely interested. Did he think it was him? Or was he just calling attention that it looked like him and wanted to tell me? Either way, never saw that behavior before or after.
A lot of crow hunting stories feel cruel to read about, though I wonder why that is.
There is something about intelligence that seems to carry a degree of... moral responsibility, somehow? Though in reality it's just an animal eating another animal, as ever.
Humans used to hunt animals by chasing them into pits and then punching holes into them with sticks until they bled out not to mention the many kinds of horrible traps for smaller prey animals.
Humane hunting is mostly something that only a rich old guy with his night vision goggles and sniper rifle can afford.
Even for farm animals, many cultures perform their sacrifice in ghastly ways.
There was a video on youtube about a crow coming to a human and making that sound, also in winter with snow; commenters agreed that it was probably thirsty and was imitating running water that way to get the human to give it water. The human in the video didn't get that. But here in the end we can see the crow eating snow, which may confirm that it is really a way for crows tell when they are thirsty? Not sure what that has to do with the owl--"teasing" might be just testing the owl's capabilities for checking whether killing the owl to drink its blood would be an option? (I guess melting snow for water is increasing the risk for the crow to be cold & run out of energy.)
Thanks to Merlin Bird ID, I've got rather into birds in the past few years. We have a robin and blackbird that hang out in the garden with us, seemingly unafraid. A couple of months back I bought a camera feeder [0] but we've still only had three bird types that visit - a coal tit who comes fairly infrequently but moves so fast the camera could easily be missing him, some amazing jackdaws who seem to take turns on the feeder, and some Eurasian magpies who are absolute fucking arseholes. I made the mistake of putting a mealworm / seed mix in the feeder once, and the mealworms were so prized by the magpies that they worked out how to empty it completely within minutes of me filling it, throwing all the seed that they weren't interested in on the floor. I've stopped putting mealworms in it now, but now they empty it just to make sure there's none in there. I'm going to have to take it down and try to fashion some kind of grate to make it much harder to get the seeds out.
[0] https://naturespy.org - not the best resolution, but plenty good enough for up close video of the birds. I did a fair bit of research and loved the fact that these guys are a social enterprise who put their profits back into conservation projects. Highly recommended.
Oh, and my other favourite corvid story - there's a guy that walks three very old dogs in my local park and he occasionally throws tiny treats down for them as they walk around. Crows started following him around the park for the treats the dogs missed, so then he started feeding them to the crows too, and now he walks slowly around the park with 3 old dogs and about 5 crows ambling along with him all in a fairly tight little group. I love crows.
It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the sidewalk, a pretty sizable rock smacked the pavement next to me, seemingly out of nowhere. If it had hit my head I would have been hurt. I finally look up and see a big crow staring directly down at me - it had dropped it from the power lines, it had seemingly been intentional, maybe as a warning, I don't know. I attributed it to malice towards the vagrants that harass them.
I was amazed at how much intelligence it would take to 1) form a grudge 2) form intent to threaten/harm, 3) formulate a plan using a weapon with cause -> effect to execute intent, 4) wait for opportunity.
I have observed a lot of very intelligent behaviors from these birds but that was the wildest one. I have seen it happen once since, so I'm convinced it isn't an accident.
Crows have also been known to alert predators like wolves to easy prey so they can pick the remains.
In other words, they seem to achieve better results with smaller brains than we thought. And yes, crows (in EU) do exhibit some pretty intelligent behavior.
Regarding that, I'm reminded of another story - on my daily walk near work, there was a dead crow on the pavement. 5 or so crows were standing all around it, doing nothing really. Even me passing close by did not trigger them to fly away or anything, it seemed like they were standing watch on the body. The next day, it was still there, same thing. The 3rd day, it was gone, but the crows were still standing watch in the same manner. I didn't know what to make of it other than it appeared they were mourning or taking part in some type of ingroup ritual. I didn't see it again after that, but it struck me.
Or, to put it another way: if corvid genetics happened upon a brain type that promoted their survival, it doesn't matter if it was "better" or "worse" than the path the monkey/hominid brains took. Genetics took the first bus going in that direction.
https://www.aaas.org/membership/member-spotlight/scientist-j...
Ravens are wonderful creatures.
I wonder if this was an elder crow whose eyesight has decreased with age and gave out the wrong descriptions to their friends. :D
One thing I didn’t not really account for is that now in the morning when I step outside our new friend really lays on the noises of excitement as he knows a meal is about to be served.
Coins? Screw that. Go right to bills.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60850767-children-of-...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241392678
> In Ray Nayler's speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl.
Birds have higher neural density than mammals (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113) so can pack a lot into their tiny heads. I do wonder what they'd have to say, if given the chance.
The fact is that humans are exceedingly quick to find patterns in random data (e.g. horescopes, any form of divination), and that tendency gets amplified when the opportunity to anthropomorphize a cute animal is presented.
There is something about intelligence that seems to carry a degree of... moral responsibility, somehow? Though in reality it's just an animal eating another animal, as ever.
Humane hunting is mostly something that only a rich old guy with his night vision goggles and sniper rifle can afford.
Even for farm animals, many cultures perform their sacrifice in ghastly ways.
Crow White is a hell of a name. Bravo to their parents.
This one is feeding a dog: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q7Z0yZhyz0s
Teasing an owl: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0i9tjnW7r0
There was a video on youtube about a crow coming to a human and making that sound, also in winter with snow; commenters agreed that it was probably thirsty and was imitating running water that way to get the human to give it water. The human in the video didn't get that. But here in the end we can see the crow eating snow, which may confirm that it is really a way for crows tell when they are thirsty? Not sure what that has to do with the owl--"teasing" might be just testing the owl's capabilities for checking whether killing the owl to drink its blood would be an option? (I guess melting snow for water is increasing the risk for the crow to be cold & run out of energy.)
[0] https://naturespy.org - not the best resolution, but plenty good enough for up close video of the birds. I did a fair bit of research and loved the fact that these guys are a social enterprise who put their profits back into conservation projects. Highly recommended.