Crows

ramonmercado said:
Crows understand water displacement at the level of a small child: Show causal understanding of a 5- to 7-year-old child
Date:
March 26, 2014

Crows understand water displacement at the level of a small child.
Credit: Sarah Jelbert; CC-BY

New Caledonian crows may understand how to displace water to receive a reward, with the causal understanding level of a 5-7 year-old child, according to results published March 26, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Sarah Jelbert from University of Auckland and colleagues.
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This is hardly new! In 2010 I posted this in Bird Brains:
Our bird brain is nothing to crow about
Wild Notebook
Simon Barnes

In one of Aesop’s fables, a thirsty crow is unable to reach the water in a jug. He tries to push the jug over, but fails. So he drops stones into the jug until the water level rises high enough for him to take his drink. Thus we are shown that thoughtfulness is superior to brute strength. It is not, then, a story about crows. It is a story about humans. You wouldn’t get a real crow behaving like that, now would you?

So I went to Madingley in Cambridgeshire to meet a lot of crows and a professor. The professor danced as she walked and wore heels like pencils. The crows were still more unexpected. Float a mealworm on the water — the crows in question are mad for them — but make sure the container is too deep for the worm to be beaked and gobbled. Guess what the crows do.

etc...

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 461#950461
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Coincidentally, I've just found another old story presented as news (not about crows though).
Old story from February 2012:
Zebra stripes evolved to keep biting flies at bay
By Victoria Gill, Science reporter, BBC Nature

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... 84#1186084
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New story, today's Telegraph:
Stripes could protect us from biting flies, scientists claim as they explain zebra markings
Biologists believe they have unravelled the evolutionary mystery of how the zebra got its stripes claiming the markings protect them from biting flies

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildli ... kings.html
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I blame over-population! There are too many people, doing too many things, so that nobody can keep track of everything any more!
 
I was at my mums over Sunday and Monday. She lives in sheltered accommodation in a quiet area. There are gardens overlooking her living room. On the Sunday I saw a crow attacking another crow. It had it on its back and appeared to be repeatedly stabbing it with its beak. Another crow was dive bombing it and a third was tugging at a wing whether to hurt it or drag it away from damage I do not know). Two magpies were also in the vicinity but not doing anything.

A while after it had happened the attacked bird was on its back, not moving and I assumed that it was dead. I found it sad but went to see if it was dead or suffering when all the other birds had gone. It was intact but feather ripped out from its underside so that pink flesh was showing. Amazingly it was breathing very hard. I thought that I would keep an eye on the situation, but a couple of hours later it was gone.

I do not know whether it had recovered sufficiently to move on or not, but i did not want to see a creature suffer a prolonged death. I still don't know what became of it.
 
We have a small crow family living on our back lawn. Before 9-6-2016 their only young had tumbled from the nest and just hung around, flightless. Fortunately the local cats ignored it. Then on 9-6-2016 it started trying out its wings. It could fly clumsily, just a few meters.

crow flying exercises 09-06-2016.jpg

On 11-06-2016 it was still being fed by its parents. It still tries that even now on 21-07-2016.

crow feeding 11-06-2016.jpg

Then on 26-06-2016 it could already fly nicely.

crow flying 26-06-2016.jpg
 
I looked at this thread, expecting it to include a crow story I noticed (but didn't read) in the media this morning. But it's not here! Can't remember where I saw it, which makes it hard to search for.

But I gathered it was about a fledgling which fell out of a nest and was rescued by a girl. But then it didn't want to leave, and although fully grown now it still lives with the young woman!
 
My maternal grandfather had a pet crow when he was young, raised from a fledgling he took from a nest. It sat on his shoulder on a strip of cloth to prevent 'involuntary laundry'.
 
I don't much think of crows but last week I did witness a violent confrontation. It had attracted a number of human spectators.

The cause of the dispute? Probably the remains of some Fried Chicken, as they were in the vicinity of a KFC outlet.

Ain't Nature wonderful! I have witnessed woodlice fighting each other to devour the corpses of poisoned slugs but I didn't hang around to see the result of this cockfight. :oops:
 
This morning a crow seemed to chase a stork who was carrying some nesting material in its beak. Strange sight. You would think that the stork can ignore the crow but it seemed to be fleeing.
And I saw two crows (I don't think they're birds of prey, I'm a bit unsure about the silhouette) spiraling high in the sky for a long time. Could that be some mating behavior?
I was lucky to get my camera in time.

crow-stork.jpg
flight.jpg
 
Yesterday I was trained by a crow.

In Edinburgh, parked near Fettes College.

I was in a car, windows & doors closed, eating an overpriced sandwich from Waitrose Comelybank, when something inescapably caught my side-view.

It was doing a sideways-on rocking/stabbing movement, and the instant I started watching, it stopped and walked towards me in the car. It stared up at me, looking deliberately over each of my shoulders, moving its head in a playacting I-know-you-are-eating way.
  • It could not see the sandwich (was below the windowline), though it could still see me eating
  • It acted entirely as if the car wasn't there- I can't emphasise this point strongly enough. As if it could see through the car like the branches of a tree.
I decided to ignore it, whereupon it moved further out (so as to make me see it again, easily) and restarted the rocking / stabbing / look-at-me movements. Side-on, maximum size, legs stretched.

So I turned again to look at it, realising that I must be one of many car-sandwich-eaters that this particular crow had trained.

This bird simply oozed confident charisma. It was massive. And learning all the time.

So I had to reward it with the last piece of bread from my sandwich (tossed-out from my window).

This trick might be a key source of food for it. Waitrose is only a few hundred yards away, so car-dwelling lunch-louts may be a common sight...for crows.

When it flew up onto the railings (assessing me as trained and finished) it grasped two adjacent rods, and stood on top of them like massive stilts. Rocking side-to-side, with total control. It behaved as if it were the cleverest bird in Edinburgh- and perhaps that is literally true.

I will of course go back and see if it tries to train me again.
 
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Ermintruder said:
Yesterday I was trained by a crow.

In Edinburgh, parked near Fettes College.

I was in a car, windows & doors closed, eating an overpriced sandwich from Waitrose Comelybank, when something inescapably caught my side-view.

It was doing a sideways-on rocking/stabbing movement, and the instant I started watching, it stopped and walked towards me in the car. It stared up at me, looking deliberately over each of my shoulders, moving its head in a playacting I-know-you-are-eating way.
  • It could not see the sandwich (was below the windowline), though it could still see me eating
  • It acted entirely as if the car wasn't there- I can't emphasise this point strongly enough. As if it could see through the car like the branches of a tree.
I decided to ignore it, whereupon it moved further out (so as to make me see it again, easily) and restarted the rocking / stabbing / look-at-me movements. Side-on, maximum size, legs stretched.

So I turned again to look at it, realising that I must be one of many car-sandwich-eaters that this particular crow had trained.

This bird simply oozed confident charisma. It was massive. And learning all the time.

So I had to reward it with the last piece of bread from my sandwich (tossed-out from my window).

This trick might be a key source of food for it. Waitrose is only a few hundred yards away, so car-dwelling lunch-louts may be a common sight...for crows.

When it flew up onto the railings (assessing me as trained and finished) it grasped two adjacent rods, and stood on top of them like massive stilts. Rocking side-to-side, with total control. It behaved as if it were the cleverest bird in Edinburgh- and perhaps that is literally true.

I will of course go back and see if it tries to train me again.
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Please take a photo!
 
One day, when I was teaching English in Japan, I was having a one-on-one lesson with a regular female student in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

The classroom windows looked over a narrow balcony, just wide enough to fit the external air conditioner apparatus and with plenty of perches for birds. We were doing some basic "listen-and-repeat" stuff when a crow came and perched by the window and looked in.

The student and I noticed our observer and continued with the lesson. Then the beast started to make the most unusual sound. it's difficult to put in writing but it was soft, sing song and regular...

uu uuuu uu

uu uuuu uu

The student and I were dumbfounded :wide: It seemed to be mimicking the rhythms and sounds we were making.

It only did it for, maybe, less than a minute then flew off. I used that room many times after but, unfortunately, the beast never came back for another lesson.
 
LordRsmacker said:
Buzzards. Soaring around looking for carrion. The crows would mob them when they got within range too.
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Are you sure? I checked the outlines of the birds and they look similar. I've been fooled by crows looking like birds of prey many times. Still, you might be right. We have buzzards in the city park.
 
uair01 said:
Are you sure? I checked the outlines of the birds and they look similar. I've been fooled by crows looking like birds of prey many times. Still, you might be right. We have buzzards in the city park.
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The wing outline looks like turkey vultures. Not sure if you have them in your area, but the wings are definitely buzzard of some type. The pic of the pair in flight is also turkey vulture flight pattern.
Turkey vultures are back for the spring here, since about March:)
 
At my former home, a wooden panel fence separated my garden from a neighbour who lived in a bungalow with four cats. At five o'clock each day she'd throw the left-over contents of the cat bowls into the grass and fill them afresh. A young crow sat on a bush in her garden and would come down to eat the old cat food. I knew nothing about this routine until the neighbour went on holiday for a fortnight and my Mum took over cat duty.
On Day nine I was having a conversation with Mum in our kitchen and we lost track of time - at ten past five there was a tap from the porch but nobody there when I went to look. A few minutes later there was another series of taps and I went through the porch to stand outside. I spotted the crow in the act of picking small stones out of the gutter and dropping them on the glass porch roof. As soon as it saw me it flew over the fence to sit on the bush and await to be fed.
Such a tiny brain but the crow had registered a new Feeder and had followed my Mum back to her house. It also knew how to gauge time and how to attract our attention when the food wasn't there at five o'clock. Marvellous and a little scary.
 
Bad Bungle said:
At my former home, a wooden panel fence separated my garden from a neighbour who lived in a bungalow with four cats. At five o'clock each day she'd throw the left-over contents of the cat bowls into the grass and fill them afresh. A young crow sat on a bush in her garden and would come down to eat the old cat food. I knew nothing about this routine until the neighbour went on holiday for a fortnight and my Mum took over cat duty.
On Day nine I was having a conversation with Mum in our kitchen and we lost track of time - at ten past five there was a tap from the porch but nobody there when I went to look. A few minutes later there was another series of taps and I went through the porch to stand outside. I spotted the crow in the act of picking small stones out of the gutter and dropping them on the glass porch roof. As soon as it saw me it flew over the fence to sit on the bush and await to be fed.
Such a tiny brain but the crow had registered a new Feeder and had followed my Mum back to her house. It also knew how to gauge time and how to attract our attention when the food wasn't there at five o'clock. Marvellous and a little scary.
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Yesterday, I visited an office in the building where I work (to see the 2 guys who run an aqualung rebreather company). While we were talking, a big crow landed on the window sill outside and seemed about to come in through the open window (but he didn't). The guys told me that the crow had done the same the other day, but it got into the office. One of the guys had said 'Uh-oh, what's the betting that it'll walk through the open window' - and tada - it did! So they had to catch it in a box and take it outside.
 
I think crows (and probably all animals) have a real sense of humour.

I used to live in a small crofting community. Across the (single-track) road from my house was a field mainly inhabited by rabbits. One day I observed a hooded crow stalk one of the rabbits which was grazing. The crow approached the rabbit from behind and when near enough, pecked the rabbit on the head. The rabbit, instead of fleeing, hopped off until a few feet out of range of the crow and continued to graze. The crow approached the rabbit once more and pecked it on the head again. The rabbit, as before, hopped out of range and continued grazing until it received a third peck on the head. This game between the crow and the rabbit went on for quite some considerable time.

I also saw a crow on overhead cables near the house. As it did with the rabbit, this crow was trying to play a game, this time the "peck the buzzard on the head" game. It was on the highest cable and a buzzard was perched on a lower cable. However, the buzzard was actually just out of reach of the crow. Undeterred,, the crow solved this problem by swinging upside down, like an acrobat on a high wire, on its cable, and was then close enough to peck the buzzard on the head.

I have also seen crows, and there are a lot of them where I live now, deliberately tease a passing buzzard into giving chase. All in all, crows seem to have a great sense of fun.
 
Newly published research indicates crows exhibit primary / sensory consciousness ...
Crows Are Capable of Conscious Thought, Scientists Demonstrate For The First Time

New research into the minds of crows has revealed a jaw-dropping finding: the canny corvids aren't just clever - they also possess a form of consciousness, able to be consciously aware of the world around them in the present. In other words, they have subjective experiences.

This is called primary, or sensory, consciousness, and it had only previously been demonstrated in primates - which means we now may have to rethink our understanding of how consciousness arises, in addition to reconsidering the avian brain.

"The results of our study opens up a new way of looking at the evolution of awareness and its neurobiological constraints," said animal physiologist Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen.

Consciousness is difficult to pin down in animals that don't speak. It's the ability to be aware of oneself and the world around you, to know what you know, and to think about that knowledge. It enhances problem-solving and decision-making - at both of which crows excel.

Primary consciousness is the most basic form of consciousness as we categorise it - awareness of perceiving the world in the present (and the immediate past and future). Primarily, it's been associated with the primate cerebral cortex, a complex layered region of the mammalian brain.

But bird brains are structured quite differently from primate brains, and are smooth where mammalian brains are layered. So even though corvids ... are incredibly smart, with cognitive abilities found in primates, questions remained over whether they could cross the line into conscious thought. ...

The results confirm that subjective experiences are not exclusive to the primate brain - and that the complex layering of the mammalian brain is not a requirement for consciousness. In fact, a second new study finds that the smoothness of bird brains is not indicative at all of a lack of complexity. ...

"The last common ancestors of humans and crows lived 320 million years ago," he said. "It is possible that the consciousness of perception arose back then and has been passed down ever since. In any case, the capability of conscious experience can be realised in differently structured brains and independently of the cerebral cortex."

This means primary consciousness could be far more common across birds and mammals than we've realised. ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-research-finds-crows-can-ponder-their-own-knowledge
 
Here are the bibliographic details and abstract from the published report on crow consciousness. The full report is accessible at the link below.

A neural correlate of sensory consciousness in a corvid bird
Andreas Nieder, Lysann Wagener, Paul Rinnert
Science 25 Sep 2020:
Vol. 369, Issue 6511, pp. 1626-1629
DOI: 10.1126/science.abb1447

Abstract
Subjective experiences that can be consciously accessed and reported are associated with the cerebral cortex. Whether sensory consciousness can also arise from differently organized brains that lack a layered cerebral cortex, such as the bird brain, remains unknown. We show that single-neuron responses in the pallial endbrain of crows performing a visual detection task correlate with the birds’ perception about stimulus presence or absence and argue that this is an empirical marker of avian consciousness. Neuronal activity follows a temporal two-stage process in which the first activity component mainly reflects physical stimulus intensity, whereas the later component predicts the crows’ perceptual reports. These results suggest that the neural foundations that allow sensory consciousness arose either before the emergence of mammals or independently in at least the avian lineage and do not necessarily require a cerebral cortex.

FULL REPORT: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6511/1626
 
Got a story here. I work on an industrial estate right on the edge of town where everything gives way to countryside; on the way to work the commute passes through a busy road interchange where there's a wide carriageway with a grassy verge in the middle. By rights this should be roadkill central for birdlife - straying onto the road or flying too low to avoid being hit by traffic.
What I saw was an unconcerned crow foraging in the grass in the central reservation. It took off. But instead of taking off directly over the roadway and into the danger zone, it gained height above the central reservation away from traffic. Once it was high enough to be safely above anything coming - not just cars, but also at a height where it would avoid lorries and buses - then it crossed the road to safety on the other side and descended.
It was doing this even when the road was clear and no traffic was coming. I wondered if this was a fluke or a one-off - but no, there were more crows about. One morning I saw what looked like a couple of recently-fledged chicks, not quite adults (is there a word for them?) - and they too took care to gain safe height before flying over the road.
So - learned behaviour being passed to offspring. Is this a little pointer to speed-evolution among birds - the ones who recognise or survive a threat learn from it - and are the ones who live to breed? Seems oddy fitting it should be corvids.
 
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