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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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].
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
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.