I saw some video once about intelligence tests on crows. In one experiment they had a tall but thin glass of water with some treat floating on the surface but it was too low for the crow to reach. So the crow started dropping rocks into the glass, causing the water level to rise, until it could reach the treat.
I was so impressed, I wanted to replicate that. I went to a park around the corner with some nuts to befriend some crows. My plan was to just feed them for a while so they would trust me. But after a few days I had flock of crows following me everywhere through the city. That was a bit too much.
My dad had a friend who worked at a remote logging area and tossed his bread crust to a raven that was perched by the road. Next day, the raven swooped past his truck as he drove past. Eventually he stopped and dug something out of his lunchbox and gave it to him.
Then every day for months, he would just hold a snack in his fingers and the raven would swoop down and grab it as he drove past. Pretty amazing to think about. That level of foresight, adherence to a routine, not giving up (days off, etc).
I knew somebody who had logged in Alaska and they swore that this one town had a huge crow who would hang out by the town's welcome sign and...welcome the visitors. Apparently crows who spend enough time around people will sometimes mimic human speech and this particular crow had been taught to welcome people in.
Crows are natures version of the flock camera network. I made the mistake of regularly throwing a cup of premium bird seed into the yard. Once they locked onto this activity I got in trouble for stopping. They would do as you describe. I'd see them standing on top of my truck as I walk out of the grocery store.
Yes! And it also was an intentional study in animal cognition. Christopher Bird and Nathan Emery at the University of Cambridge decided to test whether birds could actually do what Aesop described. Their study, published in Current Biology in August 2009, was titled: "Rooks Use Stones to Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm."
There was a related study in 2014, "Using the Aesop's Fable Paradigm to Investigate Causal Understanding of Water Displacement by New Caledonian Crows."
The explanation given by scientists is that chimpanzees need this type of memory to keep a clear mental map of their surroundings while climbing. Still, spectacular.
haha :D but consider they were not just on some rooftop nearby. They were quite close. I wouldn't mind per se but the social cost... I think it was obvious to everyone in the streets that these birds were following me. I didn't want to be the bird guy.
Birds are wild. Found a chickadee fledgling in the road earlier this year and nursed him for a couple days before we found a legitimate rehab. Little guy would just hop out of his box, perch on your finger, and sing as loud as he could until you fed him scrambled eggs. Really got me thinking about how special birds are. We have a hummingbird that visits and he'll do stuff like fly into the garage if the door is open, hover and stare at you for 1-2 seconds, and then take off. It's happened so many times I've stopped being startled by the sudden brrrr noise you hear from their wings flapping (they're so fast they can show up in the blink of an eye).
The bumblebees do something similar (I've oddly nursed three different bees with sugar water—all just happened to be in my field of vision crawling around on the ground but not flying). Now you get a bumble or two per day checking in with a quick hover and bob kind of movement before shooting off into the distance.
Does anyone know of any research into this or books identifying behavior like this?
This is more about beehaiviour research and playing with your balls, but the basic idea seems to be that even "small" brains do the same stuff the big brains do - like forming relationships, playing for fun, using tools, etc.
Crows are somewhat unique as an animal in that they've got the ability to pass information off to other members of the flock, and to continue passing information down through generations as necessary. The bird saved in this story, if it has offspring, will likely teach them that she is a safe and beloved human. At the very least, there's lots of research into this topic. I can't speak to the others, sorry.
> Crows are somewhat unique as an animal in that they've got the ability to pass information off to other members of the flock, and to continue passing information down through generations as necessary.
Not that unique. My grandfather was a forester, his favourite time passing was to whistle back bird's song, changing only a little bit at a time, turning it slowly into something totally different. The changed song was passed to other birds and offsprings no probs.
The result was quite hilarious, you went to the primeval woods and you could hear wild birds singing the Für Elise... I bet it freaked out ornithologists!
(My granddad died about 30 years ago, sadly the bird "dialect" has vanished since, but I still have some old tapes in the attic.)
This is an absolutely beautiful story! My mother always whistles back at the birds, but mostly just tries to imitate their songs. But she used to play "Für Elise" on the piano when I was a child :)
Yes! This is a heartwarming story. But the opposite is true. If you happen to piss off a crow, your life will become very difficult. You might as well move towns.
Here in Australia, magpies do something similar but in a bad way. During nesting season they'll swoop you, remember your face, and keep targeting you. My daughter got attacked two weeks ago.
That makes me wonder: If you happened to piss them off, is there a way to appease them again sort of by redeeming yourself and thereby amend the diplomatic relationship?
There was a story a few years back about a woman who did that. She was a target, so she tried leaving treats, and ended up converting one of the crows to her side and it then came to her defense against other birds.
I think the person meant that it might not be for the mask-wearer. They might be targeted by crows even when the mask comes off because the crows might still recognize them from their walking style or body odor or voice etc.
An old soviet-era book, Science for Everyone: Ethology, What Animals Do and Why? is a great read on this - https://mirtitles.org/2013/10/08/science-for-everyone-etholo... I had read this when i was young and it has always stayed with me. It gives a nice overview of the domain and is highly recommended.
As a child we had a duck that would come nest in our garden for many years, it was really quite friendly, and would come up the patio doors every morning to beg for some food, didn't seem to be afraid of us. She would have her little ducklings follow her around the garden until they eventually went off to some lake not too far away.
in one of the most interesting book "Number: The Language Of Science" by Mr. Tobias Dantzig (yes _that_ Dantzig, father of Mr. George Dantzig, the one who discovered Simplex Algorithm) talks about the "number sense", and has the following (heavily paraphrased) anecdote about a squire who want to shoot a crow that has nested in the watchtower of his estate:
Whenever he goes into the tower, the crow flies off and won’t come back until he has
left. So he tries a trick: two men go in, one comes out, and the other stays hidden.
The crow isn’t fooled and waits until the second man leaves too. The same happens with
three men and with four. Only with five men, four leaving and one staying, does the
crow lose track and return to the nest.
His conclusion is that the crow’s number sense tops out at about four.
And this short piece by the same director while looking for the other:
This short film documents six weeks in the life of a family of ravens in the Verdugo Mountains near Los Angeles. I first noticed two baby ravens who were very small and just out of the nest. This movie covers this family as their parents prepare them to go off and live life on their own.
The Ravens of Verdugo
Vance Crofoot
375 views Jul 30, 2021 LOS ANGELES
Whenever I see a story about how clever crows are, I'm reminded of that guy who gave the TED talk about crows collecting rubbish after sporting events and picking up coins in return for food. Turned out he made it all up.
Related, my favourite section of the book King Solomon's Ring from Konrad Lorenz:
I have already mentioned that jackdaws remember for a long time the creature that once triggered their rattling reaction—that is, anyone who has once attacked a jackdaw. This posed a serious obstacle when it came to ringing the chicks hatched in my colony. If I took them out of the nest to fasten the aluminum Rossitten rings onto their legs, the old jackdaws inevitably noticed and raised an unbridled rattling concert. Well then, what was I to do so that the birds would not fear me forever because of the ringing, since this fear would have immeasurably hindered my work? The solution was exceedingly simple: a disguise! Well, what kind? That was simple too. Lying right at hand in a chest in the attic—and suiting my purposes very well, even though under normal circumstances we only use it on the sixth of December—was a splendid, all-fur Krampus costume, complete with a long-tongued, horned mask that covered the entire head, and a huge, fluffy, stiffly protruding devil's tail hanging from it.
What would you imagine, gentle reader, if on a fine June day you heard a wild rattling coming from a high, peaked roof, and upon looking up, saw the Devil himself—with horns, tail, and hooves, his long tongue hanging out obviously from the heat—climbing from chimney to chimney in the midst of a swarm of deafeningly rattling black birds? I think the overall impression would this time distract your attention from the fact that Satan was using a pair of flat-nose pliers to fasten Rossitten identification rings onto the legs of jackdaw chicks, and then carefully placing the little birds back into their nest. Even I only noticed after finishing the ringing that people had gathered in a dense crowd on the main street of the village, staring at me with the exact same stunned terror as the Whitsun excursionists had from behind the fence back then. Except that had I introduced myself, the whole exercise would have lost its point, which is why I merely gave them a friendly wag of my devil's tail and vanished through the attic window.
Some limited intelligence but strictly focused on the environment and goal. Similarly, local 27B models often outperform large 816B (42B active) models in different tasks.
There's something beautifully eloquent about how a bundle of feathers may be one of this person's most cherished gifts they ever receive, no amount of money can match that.
Crows reach fabulous levels of (animal) intelligence with a brain that is a fraction of the size of the brain of great apes. I wonder what progress has been made in studying the differences in organisation between the two.
> Crows reach fabulous levels of (animal) intelligence with a brain that is a fraction of the size of the brain of great apes.
Crows have a higher raw brain-to-body mass ratio (about 2.7% for ravens) compared to adult humans (about 1.9%), so not exactly surprising they are smart.
While interesting, are the brain cells smaller, scaled down with body size? If not, it's not entirely indicative of an increased brain size compared to humans.
my point was their brain is not really a fraction of size when you compare it to their body mass, and anyway bigger brain doesn't really mean smarter animal necessarily, elephants are not that smart, so it's not really about size whether scaled or not
Why is the ratio important? Wouldn’t it be what the brain is capable of doing, determined by “wrinkles”? (Apparently the true indicator of intelligence, at least for humans). I’d imagine the bigger the brain in absolute terms, the more wrinkles, but who knows.
Not that interesting, in reality it's more common for shepherds to care for their future meals with kindness and concern than to spend their lives beating a living horse.
This woman and the crow that likes her, for example, both share a common interest in eating meat. To be fair, the crow very probably eats far more babies than the woman does.
Sure, but even so it's pretty interesting in my opinion. The amazing difference in how you treat animals depending on if you see them or not. To feel so much love to a crow that gets stuck and want to help it. Meanwhile, realistically, on the other hand she is contributing to a lot of animal suffering because she likes the way it tastes.
I was so impressed, I wanted to replicate that. I went to a park around the corner with some nuts to befriend some crows. My plan was to just feed them for a while so they would trust me. But after a few days I had flock of crows following me everywhere through the city. That was a bit too much.
Then every day for months, he would just hold a snack in his fingers and the raven would swoop down and grab it as he drove past. Pretty amazing to think about. That level of foresight, adherence to a routine, not giving up (days off, etc).
Be thankful. How many people you know are part of a murder?
https://read.gov/aesop/012.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
There was a related study in 2014, "Using the Aesop's Fable Paradigm to Investigate Causal Understanding of Water Displacement by New Caledonian Crows."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VM5QS_adrIQ
The explanation given by scientists is that chimpanzees need this type of memory to keep a clear mental map of their surroundings while climbing. Still, spectacular.
It was later repeated, and if given the same training, humans still outperform chimps in this task.
That sound so cool, like main character in your story.
https://www.thecrowshaveeyes.com/
The bumblebees do something similar (I've oddly nursed three different bees with sugar water—all just happened to be in my field of vision crawling around on the ground but not flying). Now you get a bumble or two per day checking in with a quick hover and bob kind of movement before shooting off into the distance.
Does anyone know of any research into this or books identifying behavior like this?
This is more about beehaiviour research and playing with your balls, but the basic idea seems to be that even "small" brains do the same stuff the big brains do - like forming relationships, playing for fun, using tools, etc.
Heh :)
PS. "Hive" five I guess?
Not that unique. My grandfather was a forester, his favourite time passing was to whistle back bird's song, changing only a little bit at a time, turning it slowly into something totally different. The changed song was passed to other birds and offsprings no probs.
The result was quite hilarious, you went to the primeval woods and you could hear wild birds singing the Für Elise... I bet it freaked out ornithologists!
(My granddad died about 30 years ago, sadly the bird "dialect" has vanished since, but I still have some old tapes in the attic.)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-30/magpie-swooping-seaso...
I feel like there's gotta be
https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...
https://crowlingo.org/journal/marzluff-mask-experiments-expl...
"Ethology" is the study of the behaviour of non-human animals - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology (see "References" for books).
An old soviet-era book, Science for Everyone: Ethology, What Animals Do and Why? is a great read on this - https://mirtitles.org/2013/10/08/science-for-everyone-etholo... I had read this when i was young and it has always stayed with me. It gives a nice overview of the domain and is highly recommended.
Our cats were absolutely terrified of it.
What Ravens Do
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RGmh_C3Kyg
And this short piece by the same director while looking for the other:
This short film documents six weeks in the life of a family of ravens in the Verdugo Mountains near Los Angeles. I first noticed two baby ravens who were very small and just out of the nest. This movie covers this family as their parents prepare them to go off and live life on their own.
The Ravens of Verdugo Vance Crofoot 375 views Jul 30, 2021 LOS ANGELES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbW2LmWtQ7g
It was quite a sight, especially when she was wearing dark clothing.
A few centuries before people would have had her burned for being a witch.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41405773
I have already mentioned that jackdaws remember for a long time the creature that once triggered their rattling reaction—that is, anyone who has once attacked a jackdaw. This posed a serious obstacle when it came to ringing the chicks hatched in my colony. If I took them out of the nest to fasten the aluminum Rossitten rings onto their legs, the old jackdaws inevitably noticed and raised an unbridled rattling concert. Well then, what was I to do so that the birds would not fear me forever because of the ringing, since this fear would have immeasurably hindered my work? The solution was exceedingly simple: a disguise! Well, what kind? That was simple too. Lying right at hand in a chest in the attic—and suiting my purposes very well, even though under normal circumstances we only use it on the sixth of December—was a splendid, all-fur Krampus costume, complete with a long-tongued, horned mask that covered the entire head, and a huge, fluffy, stiffly protruding devil's tail hanging from it.
What would you imagine, gentle reader, if on a fine June day you heard a wild rattling coming from a high, peaked roof, and upon looking up, saw the Devil himself—with horns, tail, and hooves, his long tongue hanging out obviously from the heat—climbing from chimney to chimney in the midst of a swarm of deafeningly rattling black birds? I think the overall impression would this time distract your attention from the fact that Satan was using a pair of flat-nose pliers to fasten Rossitten identification rings onto the legs of jackdaw chicks, and then carefully placing the little birds back into their nest. Even I only noticed after finishing the ringing that people had gathered in a dense crowd on the main street of the village, staring at me with the exact same stunned terror as the Whitsun excursionists had from behind the fence back then. Except that had I introduced myself, the whole exercise would have lost its point, which is why I merely gave them a friendly wag of my devil's tail and vanished through the attic window.
(ps. There's a new episode of Mini Fantasy Theater I haven't seen yet, hurray! https://www.davidrevoy.com/tag/minifantasytheater)
So their brain can be equivalent to a much larger primate.
we know nothing of their coordination and base everything on whats equivalent to parameters size
Crows have a higher raw brain-to-body mass ratio (about 2.7% for ravens) compared to adult humans (about 1.9%), so not exactly surprising they are smart.
This woman and the crow that likes her, for example, both share a common interest in eating meat. To be fair, the crow very probably eats far more babies than the woman does.
“Two things can be true at once” is not an interesting response for this imo.
Here's the announcement post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=johnnyApplePRNG
- and here -
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com&kind=stor...