Who's the Smartest Corvid?

29 pointsposted a day ago
by NaOH
(thetyee.ca)

24 Comments

JohnMakin

2 hours ago

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.

helterskelter

31 minutes ago

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.

prerok

an hour ago

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.

CSMastermind

4 minutes ago

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.

bruckie

27 minutes ago

I wonder what the energy/evolutionary cost of densely-connected brains is. If it's advantageous, why are crows exceptional?

xeonmc

12 minutes ago

Maybe they require the equivalent of advanced EUV machines to make?

IAmBroom

9 minutes ago

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.

fritzo

2 hours ago

By "sizable rock" do you mean large pebble or small boulder?

JohnMakin

2 hours ago

A little larger than a golf ball.

IAmBroom

6 minutes ago

Something that produces a loud exclamation in a movie character, but possible permanent brain damage IRL.

cortesoft

an hour ago

My understanding is crows can recognize individuals, so I would think back to what you did to piss off that crow, or that crow's friends.

bitwize

an hour ago

As demonstrated in humans, the ability to recognize individuals is little impediment to resentment based on group membership.

JohnMakin

an hour ago

I was guessing just a general preference towards anyone in their area. I have certainly never done anything harmful towards them.

shimman

35 minutes ago

Crows have been known to harass distinct individuals over others, even going as far as to teach other crows about this person.

I wonder if this was an elder crow whose eyesight has decreased with age and gave out the wrong descriptions to their friends. :D

Aboutplants

31 minutes ago

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.

IAmBroom

5 minutes ago

I'm hoping that is a typo for cat food, instead of training your cattle on horrifically scavenged body parts.

noelwelsh

an hour ago

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.

tejohnso

an hour ago

Chasing a bird of lesser intelligence so that it slams into an office building window seems especially cruel.

fortran77

an hour ago

Birds chase coyotes so they slam into the sides of cliff walls, sometimes even painting a fake tunnel to fool the coyote.

doodlebugging

3 minutes ago

The bird that does that in the cartoon, a roadrunner, is the real king of the yard at my place. My murder of crows hang out and munch peanuts until the roadrunner shows up and then they scatter to the wind. One roadrunner sending more than a dozen crows skittering is pretty funny. They roosted in nearby trees or circled until the roadrunner had left the area before returning to the peanuts.

I taught one crow to say "peanut" and that crow in turn has been teaching another of the group. I ran spectral analysis on the audio from a video I took of the crow mimicking my voice and the intonation and spectral content was nearly a perfect match. Pretty remarkable seeing as it mimicked everything without ever coming near me. It perched on a pole or in a nearby tree watching and listening as I put out the peanuts. I was careful each time to say just one word, peanut!. The bird recognized that the word referred to the peanuts and decided that using that word might be a way to get peanuts whenever it wanted. So today, it will find me outside and perch nearby, within a couple hundred feet, and then say peanut! and watch for my response.