My late father developed a feeding ritual for a crow that lasted for over a decade and was prompted entirely by the crow’s decision to stand in a particular position, which he would only do if he observed my father in the kitchen. It happened a few times a week on the crow’s own schedule, the same way every time.
There were no gifts but over the years we did witness this crow clearly trying to teach its very dependent growing child how to work the human. Ultimately it never succeeded, and we presume this crow eventually either passed on or moved on. But one of the gaggle of jealous magpies who observed the process did take up the role. Being more timid it didn’t simply stand and wait, but would appear, circle the feeding spot until it got my father’s attention, fly up to one specific branch and wait, but otherwise repeat the process it observed. That went on for a couple of years.
The process itself varied according to what food was thrown out, but the crow slowly developed a particularly clever strategy for carrying off whole stale bread crusts by dragging it to a water bowl, moistening then trimming and diagonally cutting a slot into the bread from one corner almost all the way to the other, such that it could hang either side of the beak in a balanced fashion; the magpie that took over learned this by observation and attempted it from day one.
My blue jays observe me in my kitchen and fly over and I feed them unsalted peanuts. If there are none around they'll come if I whistle. Cardinals did the same and were less timid and would come closer until I gave them their own feeder now they don't care about me.
Blue jays are so aggressive towards the other birds that come to feed at my kitchen window. We get cardinals, titmouse, chickadee, robins, and others. The blue jays are triple their size and don't care for the competition.
Yeah, the Eurasian jay does this too, though they do it very defensively; they are often shy.
Jackdaws in the UK do it as well, but they definitely hang around like little gangs of urchins on people’s verges and front lawns; humans amuse them.
(They also grieve, despite what people say; I saw our local gang of six once, reduced to five, making odd quiet noises and unwilling to leave one of their gang that had been struck by a car and was quite obviously dead).
TIL. We hear and see the blue jays on our property frequently. We occasionally see a hawk but yet we hear hawk calls fairly frequently too. I always assumed I wasn't seeing the hawk. It never occurred to me another bird mimic the hawk calls. That's really interesting.
It's a pity they're such jerks. On their own terms they are absolutely beautiful birds. But they're not so beautiful that I don't also want to see some of the other beautiful birds that live around here.
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).
The Australian Magpie has similar behaviour to crows/ravens, although they are not closely related. They are very intelligent birds and will respond to regular feeding quickly and then expect it. If they are not fed, they'll tap on your window or walk into your house through an open door to tell you off.
They recognise the faces, voices, unique gait, posture and body language of people from their local area, and can remember an average of around 30 people. Some have been known to recognise up to 100 different people. They remember people for around 5 years. They'll know who lives where, what your regular schedule is, and which path you regularly travel along. They even know all the local cats and dogs and even can identify specific bicycles, cars and bright clothing uniforms (such as postal uniform).
During breeding season, they are most famous for swooping anyone near their nest who they deem as a threat (about 10% of males swoop). They will avoid swooping people they recognise though, so friends get a free pass.
They also hold grudges, so if you do something to annoy or threaten them, they will remember you. Some people have been on a magpie's "enemies list", and returned to a location 10+ years later and immediately been targeted, as the bird recognised them. Some birds even teach their young which people are to be treated as enemies.
They are fascinating. I think you understate a little just how aggressive they can be when they are nesting nearby. You literally neeed to run for your life if a local magpie decides you are not to be trusted! Their attacks can be vicious, it makes the news regularly :)
Oh and I saw videos of them opening garbage cans in teams! One cannot possibly do it but they manage it by partnering with their friends.
A while ago they stopped research with backpack-like trackers on magpies because the magpies figured out a way to take the trackers off each other. The first instance of magpie-cooperation that was purely altruistic! No food reward involved.
I couldn't find a link, but there's a Bizzaro strip that shows a sculptor putting the finishing touches on his latest work: an elderly mannequin made of peanut butter and bird seed, dressed and seated in a wheel chair. The artist smiles as he imagines the reaction he'll get when he wheels the sculpture through a park full of pigeons.
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.
My family rescued a jackdaw when I was growing up and it lived with us, we named him Klaus.
He could say “goddag” (hello) and “gå væk” (go away), and he would use them in context. Say hello to people entering, and go away if he wanted to be left alone.
When he was young he would steal my granddads cigar, fly up somewhere high in a tree or a lightpole, but where he could be seen, and dismantle it.
He grew very old and had a lot of white feathers in the end. I’ve always liked jackdaws after that, I love seeing them around and their little personalities.
18 minute short film about a very social corella that adopted an entire community in the north of Australia, surfing on car bonnets, stealing cards from players, performing for food, hurling insults, teasing dogs, etc.
There was an American Crow at a local wildlife rescue who could speak and mimic sounds. He would do a ringtone sort of sound, said "caw, caw" in a very human voice (presumably mimicking people mimicking crows), and sometimes would say "American Crow" (as he was identified by the sign on his enclosure).
I had an interaction with a raven in California that made me sure it has seen the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. I was sitting on the ground, and it was behind me. It clearly wanted a bit of the sandwich I was eating, but it didn't move a muscle. Every time I turned around, it continued to be dead still, but was just a little closer to me. When it was finally about a foot away from me and just as statuesque as ever, I told it to buzz off because I wasn't going to feed it. It seemed to have understood and just walked away slowly, looking back at me occasionally with a hurt look in its eyes.
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.
I feed crows on my nightly bike ride. Sometimes there are multiple crows, the proverbial "murder". If there are just a few, as far as I'm concerned it's just a manslaughter...
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."
I once met a woman named Bar. You guessed it, we met at a bar
Another girl I went out with during the same time period was Ifat - and yes, she was heavy set. Moran was actually quite bright, despite her name. Shiran actually did jog, and Hadass did have a nice figure. Tal was shorter than I expected, but Lital was bigger than I expected. Nofit, well, she had great legs at least.
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.
Indeed. That video made a impact on me too. Obviously people are trying to "debunk" it, but we can clearly see the challenge the chimp was set and how it aces it. Even gaming out scenarios of intense preparation (i.e. cheating) it's hard to imagine most humans matching the performance shown.
The one that tickled me, was Carrion Crows and Eurasian Magpies using anti-bird spikes as part of their nests, with the Magpies placing them on top possibly to deter other birds.
Some crow experts discourage feeding them because they can be a bit too much.
OTOH the Swiss Department of Agriculture says that there is nothing that actually works against corvids. You can scare them and you can make their life difficult, but they learn, and show others how to bypass issues (possibly on "Corvid News"), so they might lose some battle but will win the war.
I have been doing this regularly (unfortunately, can't do it daily) near where I buy groceries, which is next to where my kid goes to school. I started during summer, as a joke - they would have their own Air Force when they returned to school, and now they know my car.
Hooded crows seem to be friendlier, and come the closest, but rooks open their mouths as if I am their parent. They pick up cat food in the air and, sometimes, from my hand (some of the hooded crows do that, and pretty much all the starlings, which we call "honorary crows"). Jackdaws are the least friendly (or the most scared). Sometimes they come in couples, sometimes with their kids.
There are no ravens in my neighborhood, which I find sad. If I ever befriend a couple of them, I'll call them Edgar and Lenore.
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.
Around here in the autumn crows engage with various nuts, hard shell ones included difficult or impossible for them to open. So they frequent the bicycle tracks with high traffic, fly above you from the back, elevate a bit while dropping their nuts so you can run those over. Lots of heavy cargo bikes are used by families here, so it is a fruitful exercise for them. Assuming the cyclist realises what is happening and instead of avoiding the nut - like I did the first time not having a clue what this is about - run over it.
Corvids are well known to do it with cars, I believe even intentionally setting nuts (or snails or shellfish) in front of the tires of cars waiting at the red lights. But bikes are probably even better as they don’t completely mush the snacks against the pavement.
Oh man. Think about the street creed derived from having a flock of crows following you everywhere. Think about all the possibilities, the things you could train them to do.
Then, after ruling your city, you could start exporting a few crows to neighboring cities, so they could recruit in your behalf.
After your first state, the whole country, then Canada, central america, western europe. Freight liners full of your crows' Army crossing the oceans. Enforcing non-fly zones, eliminating political enemies, spying, policing your domains, directing and supervising human workers.
Command a few AI data centers and a few research labs, put then to work 24/7 on neuralink interfaces for crows, so you could have AI-enabled, starlink connected squadrons of crows.
Then, an accelerated genetic improvement program, CRISPR, cloning, all the stuff. AI-Enabled-Starlink-Connected-Super-Crows. At your command!
Frankly, you should work more on your ambition levels.
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.
> the basic idea seems to be that even "small" brains do the same stuff the big brains do
The shorter distances would allow for lower latencies, making the perception of time different. What we take a couple seconds to decide they must think took minutes and we are incredibly slow thinkers. The number of connections is lower, as is the neuron count, and I imagine they can't hold as much in working memory as we do, but, apart from that, they appear to be very smart.
Which is also why I think young children are so annoying to adults. They just think way faster, since they have much less things to consider and past experience to compare with, so they already skipped to the overnext topic, while the adult is still considering the last thing. Also all the people I talked to about it and myself report feeling that time becomes faster is you become older. There is of course also the affect that you perceive time less as you don't pay attention, because it is just regular Tuesday, but even if you only do new stuff for a day, it feels shorter than when you were young.
I agree - time keeps getting faster and faster as I age. In addition to less novelty and change, I like to think of it in terms of the fraction of your life lived so far. When you're 5 years old, every day is about 550 ppm (parts per million) of your life. When you're 35, every day is only 80 ppm. Of course it feels faster!
Portia jumping spiders are incredibly smart. People have done experiments where they place the spiders in a complex environment with food in a hard to access location and they basically just sit there looking around until they've figured out a route to get the food. It takes them a while, I guess because they can only process so much information at a time, but they're remarkably good at doing it.
It's not that simple -- small animals move their bodies much faster than us, but the time scale at which they think seems to be similar to ours.
There was a 2022 study on rats which showed that when they listen to music, they will spontaneously move their bodies to the rhythm, like us. And the range of tempos where this effect is strongest is 120-140bpm.
Hummingbirds are weird. I had assumed that given the size of their brains, they'd be not as smart (naive assumption). But they are curious critters! I have a few who visit my backyard, where I have a chair which noone uses. The other day I decided to sit down in the chair and soak in the sun (a rarity in SF, I might add) with my eyes closed. And soon I heard a low buzzing sound, and what do you know? A hummingbird was hovering about a foot away from my face, observing me. It backed off a bit when I opened my eyes, but did hover around for a few more seconds before flying away. The control they have on their flight is unbelievable. They can hover with so much precision!
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.)
Not surprising it died out, and probably quickly. Birds trained to sing Fur Elise would probably be at a disadvantage in attracting a mate imprinted on a more typical song.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah this happened to me when I was around 12 years old on my way to school. I spotted the crow one day in the middle of the road and thought it was a raven because it was so big for a crow. Then a car came and I guess it thought I attacked it with the car so it got pissed. Since that day it started attacking me every day as I went to school for about 1-2 years. Nothing too serious though but I had to be on my guard, it would literally position itself right where the sun was so I couldn't really see when it would strike at me if it did - most of the time it just screamed at me 5 meters away.
When our cat was thirsty, he used to go into our shower unit and start knocking bottles of shampoo over until we put the shower head down low and turned it on gently so he could have a drink.
Our dog has started doing the same, from watching the cat.
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.
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.
I fed crows for one summer but had to stop after it kept leaving baby bird parts, usually heads, for me and my neighbors. If it was just me, that's one thing, but my neighbor was tiring of finding bird parts in her bird bath.
I made it to the point where I could jingle my keys to let them know that I was putting food out and they would come down within a few minutes. They love cat kibble and blueberries, but will not eat apples or walnut pieces.
Besides the baby bird parts, I received:
1. French fries
2. BBQ ribs, just the bone and a little sauce
3. Baked ziti noodles
4. An adult dead bird. It was opened up, and presumably most of the organs were removed.
5. Chunks of bread / bun
6. Chicken nuggets
There's a McDonald's a few miles from my house and I think that they were raiding the dumpster.
It was a neat experience, and I still hear them cawing at me from time to time. You'd think that they would all sound the same, but they definitely have distinct "voices" once you get to know them.
That's so interesting! The crow family I give snacks to loves berries, pecans, and walnuts specifically, but not apples or grapes. Maybe it's a regional thing though, because I'm sure to feed them only things that grow in the area.
Walnuts, apples, and grapes all grow where I live. I was going to suggest that they might go for apples and walnuts if there was no other choice, but they left them there for days. The squirrels would eventually find the walnuts, but nobody (except the ants and hornets) would go for the apples.
If I ever move out of the suburbs into a place more remote / with more land, I'm definitely feeding crows again.
My neighbors used to have a wooden fence, and I was outside and saw a robin with its leg wedged and stuck between the slats. The robin was terrified of me, so I put on some leather gloves and gently dislodged it and released the bird, while it was trying to peck at my fingers. For the rest of the summer, if I was outside, a robin would follow me around the yard and sing to me. I don't know if it was the same bird or not, but I like to think that it was. :-)
One reason I've hesitated to firm this kind of relationship is the fear that, were I to accidentally trigger a violent / startled response from the bird, it could gouge on of my eyes before I could respond.
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.
IIRC humans have a threshold at the same point. For up to 4 objects we can determine the exact count at a glance. For more we estimate or have to do deliberate counting. Maybe the crow just can't do the deliberate counting.
It is really stories like these remind us to being kind to animals.
When Lawrence Anthony ("The Elephant Whisperer") died of a heart attack, two separate wild elephant herds began walking from different remote areas, covering roughly 12 miles over 12 hours, arriving outside his family home two days after his death, the herds stood near for two full days and nights like a vigil to mourn[1].
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
This, along with all the evidence we have of other non-human animals’ intelligence, ability to use tools, and at this point undeniable sentience, I find some of the conversation and worrying about anthropomorphizing AI frustrating, and possibly even worrying.
What’s evident is that humans have a long history of anthropo-denial, where we dismiss evidence of non human sentience and intelligence even when it’s starting us in the face.
Those lies have allowed us to engage in what ins fairly obviously unethical mass exploitation of non human animals, which hopefully we will start winding down, but we may also add billions of AIs to that list, if we show the same behavior of denying evidence of sentience in AI this time.
Yes. I think it's clear at this point that all the things a human brain does are emergent properties of a large neural network wired up to a particular set of sensors. Similar emergent properties emerge in any other entity with a sufficiently large "brain", modulo hardware performance and capacity.
A woman near me feeds some grey crows. Before I found that out they would "harass" me and my dog when we walked in the area and I didn't understand why.
Then one day I saw the woman walk her 4 dogs and feed these crows. Then I started putting it together, she has smaller dogs, about the same size as mine.
So these crows, presumably, had seen me and my dog about 2km away from where she normally walks her dogs, and came over for food. My dog just thought they were something to chase.
My late neighbour Tullio (wonderful old man, clock maker) once told me that when he was a kid he cared for a chick crow and they went on to be friends for many years. For example he would ride his bike to work in the morning and the crow would accompany him along the way, and then back home in the evening. What a magical frienship.
Makes me think of "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Great sci-fi series about spiders, crows, and squid evolving and traveling into space. Very different take on space travel. The crows there learn to work as a pair to do advanced tasks.
Not squid, octipodes. Anyway, he does an excellent job of extrapolating from the actual quirks of each animal into a culture and then playing with how those cultures would or wouldn't get along.
On the one hand it’s a sign of crow consciousness. On the other hand it’s a sign of very limited intelligence: obviously crows don’t understand us at all. Just no theory of mind for humans.
It would be like a human thanking a crow by gifting it a DVD player
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.
Having personally witnessed a group of 5 crows being tricked and driven out of their newly made nest by a pair of bluejays, I have skepticism that they are any smarter than most other birds. Other than owls, which are definitely dumb as a bag of rocks.
Owls don't really have to be smart. They just need to be quick, ferocious, and murderous. Evolution only selects for intelligence when necessary as it's metabolically expensive.
Bluejays are in the same family as crows (Corvidae) and are just as smart as crows and exhibit just as strong problem-solving skills. Not sure why crows got all the Corvidae intellectual cred in pop culture.
For example, blue Jays can mimic hawks and use their hawk mimics to clear bird feeders of other species or scare away squirrels after they've watched where they hid their nuts.
You may wish to rename that to Swallow Intelligence (SI) otherwise you may be marked as the enemy. The term SI actually reminds me of the super intelligence in Peter F Hamilton Pandora series.
If hacker news is a place to post feel good animal videos then my contribution is this live cam of a litter of puppies (mostly sleeping). Click on the "Katso suorana" button
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.
In parts of South Asia crows are considered messengers to dead ancestors and are hence fed as part of memorial rituals. This role is probably in no small part due to observations of their intelligence.
We have a rental unit on our property that was vacant for a while that had a hole in it somewhere and one summer I was removing about two starlings a day.
What struck me was the varied personality of the birds. Some of them would come right to my hands like it was a Disney movie, others I would have to chase into a corner and carefully capture.
One day I was walking towards my firepit and a whole tree full of starlings was cackling at me getting louder and louder to scold me as I approached and I was pretty offended that they were telling me what to do on my own land. At one moment collectively they flew away in a great big flock with a few slow birds left behind who took off to follow the main bod about three seconds later.
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.
I love the local jackdaw crew near me. My lunchtime ritual is to sit down by the water with a pasty, and chuck bits of pastry for them. They're exceptional catches, will pluck it right out the air. Wonderful to watch, really makes my day.
My jackdaws are a lot more cautious. It might be they are scared by the more numerous hooded crows and rooks, but I haven't seen inter-species hostilities, unless between crows and seagulls, which are assholes.
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.
Yeah — science is seemingly only just getting into the question of how much of an inner life bumblebees and other solitary bees might have.
There's a lot of surprising things about them, like puzzle solving, some evidence of a capacity for play and the ability to select food not just for nutrition but for apparent enjoyment.
> 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.
Most of the brain is not doing intelligence, it is doing nerves and muscle control. Larger bodies require larger brains because otherwise they wouldn't be able to control all the muscles needed to move.
Tangentially related, can recommend Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow from Ted Hughes.
Dark poems, you’ll like. You’ll be able to feel like a crow after reading it.
Haven't watched the video and it might be amazing. So no offense but the title alone matches so well with a lot of ai slop I have recently seen on YouTube that I am not really motivated to watch it. Anyone else?
My wife helped an injured crow out of the road last year, but didn't realize it had already died. The crows knew this. She effectively interrupted a funeral.
For weeks later, the crows would yell at her, and one even dive-bombed and hit her in the head as she got into our car.
Crows are amazing creatures. Make sure you stay on their good side :)
Crows are clever enough to be dangerous (they can remember a face, connect it to a past incident, carry a grudge over that incident, communicate this grudge to their friends, and actively plan violent revenge) but also dumb enough that this intelligence is often self-defeating and counterproductive (randomly attacking people unprovoked). They are a great example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Thankfully, they are intelligent enough to understand credible deterrence: a surefire way of resolving an ongoing dispute with crows is, of course, by using a gun. Thankfully crow hunting season is quite generous in my state and they taste pretty good.
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.
You can totally be friends with a chicken, and still eat chicken eggs, they don't mind. Most chickens have been bred to have little interest in incubating the eggs. Not sure how a crow would react...
Side note, I saved a few Guinea Fowl chicks from the road the other day. When I put them down next to the parents and the other chicks, one of the parents launched at me and tried to claw out my eyes. My eyes survived intact, but I had a few scratches on my ears and arms
I don't understand the premise of your argument then. I thought you were trying to say the animals are too smart to eat, but then here you are saying they're too dumb. IIRC there have been studies that show plants also "feel" and react to humans, so where are you drawing the line between what is and isn't acceptable to consume by us? What if the human is too dumb to understand that what it is eating has advanced cognition, is it still wrong or do we give them a pass for being too dumb? I don't think you can simplify this matter so easily with a drive-by comment like yours.
It is strange that everyone is so enthusiastic about the gratitude. If the crow were a Silicon Valley company and the woman an open source developer, we'd get:
"Society owes you nothing. The woman gave away her labor under a permissive license and the crow society just took what she offered under her own free will. What I really cannot stand is people giving something away and then demanding additional terms."
We had a window with a mirrored film to reduce the amount of sun into its room and the neighborhood crows were obsessed with it. They would fly into it, sit right outside the window and chatter loudly, and peck at the window.
Unfortunately this window was on my infant's nursery and the crow noises would constantly wake her up during nap time. My wife asked me to help and I tried a scarecrow, I tried shooing them away right after they woke up the baby, but neither helped. I finally took a pellet gun and shot one of them after another baby-waking incident. All the crows flew away and screeched angrily at me for ~5 minutes before leaving. I never saw them again.
It’s cool how you killed a crow because you didn’t feel like getting a shade and removing the toy that you gave them to play with. They were clearly at fault.
Mice spread disease, cause structural damage, ruin food, and can bring mite infestations. This would be more like putting decorative corn cobs on your window sill and surrounding it with traps because you didn’t like the noise squirrels made eating it.
There were no gifts but over the years we did witness this crow clearly trying to teach its very dependent growing child how to work the human. Ultimately it never succeeded, and we presume this crow eventually either passed on or moved on. But one of the gaggle of jealous magpies who observed the process did take up the role. Being more timid it didn’t simply stand and wait, but would appear, circle the feeding spot until it got my father’s attention, fly up to one specific branch and wait, but otherwise repeat the process it observed. That went on for a couple of years.
The process itself varied according to what food was thrown out, but the crow slowly developed a particularly clever strategy for carrying off whole stale bread crusts by dragging it to a water bowl, moistening then trimming and diagonally cutting a slot into the bread from one corner almost all the way to the other, such that it could hang either side of the beak in a balanced fashion; the magpie that took over learned this by observation and attempted it from day one.
Jackdaws in the UK do it as well, but they definitely hang around like little gangs of urchins on people’s verges and front lawns; humans amuse them.
(They also grieve, despite what people say; I saw our local gang of six once, reduced to five, making odd quiet noises and unwilling to leave one of their gang that had been struck by a car and was quite obviously dead).
Now excuse me while I pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram
Who doesn’t want to see something amazing like a parakeet in a random British back garden? All the other birds, that’s who!
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).
They recognise the faces, voices, unique gait, posture and body language of people from their local area, and can remember an average of around 30 people. Some have been known to recognise up to 100 different people. They remember people for around 5 years. They'll know who lives where, what your regular schedule is, and which path you regularly travel along. They even know all the local cats and dogs and even can identify specific bicycles, cars and bright clothing uniforms (such as postal uniform).
During breeding season, they are most famous for swooping anyone near their nest who they deem as a threat (about 10% of males swoop). They will avoid swooping people they recognise though, so friends get a free pass.
They also hold grudges, so if you do something to annoy or threaten them, they will remember you. Some people have been on a magpie's "enemies list", and returned to a location 10+ years later and immediately been targeted, as the bird recognised them. Some birds even teach their young which people are to be treated as enemies.
Oh and I saw videos of them opening garbage cans in teams! One cannot possibly do it but they manage it by partnering with their friends.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/60530212
Ah yes, I am familiar with this Bluey lore
He could say “goddag” (hello) and “gå væk” (go away), and he would use them in context. Say hello to people entering, and go away if he wanted to be left alone.
When he was young he would steal my granddads cigar, fly up somewhere high in a tree or a lightpole, but where he could be seen, and dismantle it.
He grew very old and had a lot of white feathers in the end. I’ve always liked jackdaws after that, I love seeing them around and their little personalities.
Edit: Apologies - dead link, after years of being up :/
See: https://flickerfest.com.au/film/ngarritj/
18 minute short film about a very social corella that adopted an entire community in the north of Australia, surfing on car bonnets, stealing cards from players, performing for food, hurling insults, teasing dogs, etc.
I managed to get a recording once: https://drive.google.com/file/d/109wzdIsVW7hZwX1-8M3IioUMr49...
I also don't think the name "flock" is a coincidence. Fuck flock (the company) obviously.
Not sure of why this is. Crows are smart, but also can be very nasty (like us).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Saint_Albans
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...
Another girl I went out with during the same time period was Ifat - and yes, she was heavy set. Moran was actually quite bright, despite her name. Shiran actually did jog, and Hadass did have a nice figure. Tal was shorter than I expected, but Lital was bigger than I expected. Nofit, well, she had great legs at least.
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.
Edit: Answering myself: https://gwern.net/doc/algernon/2009-silberberg.pdf
However,
* we see no videos of the two men doing the test. Notice how the ape barely looks at the task, while the men maybe were highly concentrated.
* The men had the goal to improve and beat the ape, the ape probably did not have that goal.
* The men created the circumstances themself, so it may be possible the knowingly or unknowingly gave themself better conditions than the ape.
* The men did up to 2500 units of training, it is unknown how much the ape got.
* We can see that the ape does nine numbers in some tests, the men did just five.
* the men propably relied on language to learn the task, the ape did not.
So, this is quite a flawed study too.
Be thankful. How many people you know are part of a murder?
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/apparently-magpies-and-crow...
OTOH the Swiss Department of Agriculture says that there is nothing that actually works against corvids. You can scare them and you can make their life difficult, but they learn, and show others how to bypass issues (possibly on "Corvid News"), so they might lose some battle but will win the war.
That sound so cool, like main character in your story.
https://youtu.be/EQG5fi-2xns
Hooded crows seem to be friendlier, and come the closest, but rooks open their mouths as if I am their parent. They pick up cat food in the air and, sometimes, from my hand (some of the hooded crows do that, and pretty much all the starlings, which we call "honorary crows"). Jackdaws are the least friendly (or the most scared). Sometimes they come in couples, sometimes with their kids.
There are no ravens in my neighborhood, which I find sad. If I ever befriend a couple of them, I'll call them Edgar and Lenore.
https://www.thecrowshaveeyes.com/
That screenshot from the movie looks terribad and I’m not sure if I want to google it.
Then, after ruling your city, you could start exporting a few crows to neighboring cities, so they could recruit in your behalf.
After your first state, the whole country, then Canada, central america, western europe. Freight liners full of your crows' Army crossing the oceans. Enforcing non-fly zones, eliminating political enemies, spying, policing your domains, directing and supervising human workers.
Command a few AI data centers and a few research labs, put then to work 24/7 on neuralink interfaces for crows, so you could have AI-enabled, starlink connected squadrons of crows.
Then, an accelerated genetic improvement program, CRISPR, cloning, all the stuff. AI-Enabled-Starlink-Connected-Super-Crows. At your command!
Frankly, you should work more on your ambition levels.
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.
The shorter distances would allow for lower latencies, making the perception of time different. What we take a couple seconds to decide they must think took minutes and we are incredibly slow thinkers. The number of connections is lower, as is the neuron count, and I imagine they can't hold as much in working memory as we do, but, apart from that, they appear to be very smart.
There was a 2022 study on rats which showed that when they listen to music, they will spontaneously move their bodies to the rhythm, like us. And the range of tempos where this effect is strongest is 120-140bpm.
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00262.html
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://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/380/1925/202...
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...
Our dog has started doing the same, from watching the cat.
I like to think the crows from my neighborhood think I'm their cat food god.
Our cats were absolutely terrified of it.
I knew a couple that had a pretty big cat, and a parrot (I think an African Grey, but can't remember, exactly).
The parrot would walk around the house, and the cat would ignore it.
I asked if the cat ever attacked the parrot, and the answer was "Yes. Once.".
"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.
I made it to the point where I could jingle my keys to let them know that I was putting food out and they would come down within a few minutes. They love cat kibble and blueberries, but will not eat apples or walnut pieces.
Besides the baby bird parts, I received:
There's a McDonald's a few miles from my house and I think that they were raiding the dumpster.It was a neat experience, and I still hear them cawing at me from time to time. You'd think that they would all sound the same, but they definitely have distinct "voices" once you get to know them.
Here is my crow friend: https://i.imgur.com/1A37se8.mp4
That's so interesting! The crow family I give snacks to loves berries, pecans, and walnuts specifically, but not apples or grapes. Maybe it's a regional thing though, because I'm sure to feed them only things that grow in the area.
If I ever move out of the suburbs into a place more remote / with more land, I'm definitely feeding crows again.
My neighbors used to have a wooden fence, and I was outside and saw a robin with its leg wedged and stuck between the slats. The robin was terrified of me, so I put on some leather gloves and gently dislodged it and released the bird, while it was trying to peck at my fingers. For the rest of the summer, if I was outside, a robin would follow me around the yard and sing to me. I don't know if it was the same bird or not, but I like to think that it was. :-)
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.
Anyone know how realistic that concern is?
When Lawrence Anthony ("The Elephant Whisperer") died of a heart attack, two separate wild elephant herds began walking from different remote areas, covering roughly 12 miles over 12 hours, arriving outside his family home two days after his death, the herds stood near for two full days and nights like a vigil to mourn[1].
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9gZceeIxnfo
Now regarding how elephants knew he passed (all the sources I’ve seen say no one told the elephants), there are few possibilities:
- whole thing is made up
- someone told the elephants
- the elephants knew through magic/energy/tree of life/etc
- the elephants knew from other animals, maybe the crows told them
Now take your belief
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
The documentary in the 1st link is not accessible in my country but at least i now know what to look for.
What’s evident is that humans have a long history of anthropo-denial, where we dismiss evidence of non human sentience and intelligence even when it’s starting us in the face.
Those lies have allowed us to engage in what ins fairly obviously unethical mass exploitation of non human animals, which hopefully we will start winding down, but we may also add billions of AIs to that list, if we show the same behavior of denying evidence of sentience in AI this time.
Then one day I saw the woman walk her 4 dogs and feed these crows. Then I started putting it together, she has smaller dogs, about the same size as mine.
So these crows, presumably, had seen me and my dog about 2km away from where she normally walks her dogs, and came over for food. My dog just thought they were something to chase.
His other SciFi is also great.
I'm still a nerd, but at least I have company :)
It would be like a human thanking a crow by gifting it a DVD player
For example, blue Jays can mimic hawks and use their hawk mimics to clear bird feeders of other species or scare away squirrels after they've watched where they hid their nuts.
(ps. There's a new episode of Mini Fantasy Theater I haven't seen yet, hurray! https://www.davidrevoy.com/tag/minifantasytheater)
https://areena.yle.fi/1-78104441
What struck me was the varied personality of the birds. Some of them would come right to my hands like it was a Disney movie, others I would have to chase into a corner and carefully capture.
One day I was walking towards my firepit and a whole tree full of starlings was cackling at me getting louder and louder to scold me as I approached and I was pretty offended that they were telling me what to do on my own land. At one moment collectively they flew away in a great big flock with a few slow birds left behind who took off to follow the main bod about three seconds later.
They probably felt the same.
[1] like with rare exceptions we can't climb trees!
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.
So their brain can be equivalent to a much larger primate.
There's a lot of surprising things about them, like puzzle solving, some evidence of a capacity for play and the ability to select food not just for nutrition but for apparent enjoyment.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41405773
They play with my dog, I can feed some of them from my hand and they follow me around in the neighborhood.
Was really easy, I just kept throwing them shelled peanuts and slowly they got used to me. Cool birds.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/upvoted?id=ChrisRR>
My wife helped an injured crow out of the road last year, but didn't realize it had already died. The crows knew this. She effectively interrupted a funeral.
For weeks later, the crows would yell at her, and one even dive-bombed and hit her in the head as she got into our car.
Crows are amazing creatures. Make sure you stay on their good side :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtTu6TzLZIE
I saw this video referenced from this guy's longer video about a crow escape room he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpg3VvoIVfA
Of course take it with the typical grain of youtube salt
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.
You can totally be friends with a chicken, and still eat chicken eggs, they don't mind. Most chickens have been bred to have little interest in incubating the eggs. Not sure how a crow would react...
Side note, I saved a few Guinea Fowl chicks from the road the other day. When I put them down next to the parents and the other chicks, one of the parents launched at me and tried to claw out my eyes. My eyes survived intact, but I had a few scratches on my ears and arms
“Two things can be true at once” is not an interesting response for this imo.
the chicken is dead and cooked, but also has been raised with certain living standards and ensured to be a certain level of food safety
"Society owes you nothing. The woman gave away her labor under a permissive license and the crow society just took what she offered under her own free will. What I really cannot stand is people giving something away and then demanding additional terms."
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...
We had a window with a mirrored film to reduce the amount of sun into its room and the neighborhood crows were obsessed with it. They would fly into it, sit right outside the window and chatter loudly, and peck at the window.
Unfortunately this window was on my infant's nursery and the crow noises would constantly wake her up during nap time. My wife asked me to help and I tried a scarecrow, I tried shooing them away right after they woke up the baby, but neither helped. I finally took a pellet gun and shot one of them after another baby-waking incident. All the crows flew away and screeched angrily at me for ~5 minutes before leaving. I never saw them again.