Comment by Normille | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Normille | Hacker News Reader

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  >Magpies are amazing...

Corvids in general are.

When out walking one night a few years back, I was lucky enough to find a baby jackdaw on the ground that must have fallen from its nest. It was completely cold and not moving. I picked it up and was about to discard it again, thinking it was dead, when I noticed its claw twitch slightly. So I cupped it in my hands to warm it and took it home with me and gradually nursed it back to health.

It stayed with me for about a year or more and even came on a couple of camping holidays round Ireland and Wales with me. I became quite a tourist attraction, as I'd be walking along a beach or in some countryside and suddenly this bird would appear as if from nowhere and land on my shoulder. passers by would be gobsmacked and ask to take a photo of the crazy bird man.

As the jackdaw got older, it got more independent and would go flying off for longer and longer periods until, one day it flew off to join another group of jackdaws in a park and never came back.

One of my coolest memories ever was one night me and the missus had gone out to dinner. The jackdaw had flown off somewhere, earlier in the day and not come back. When we returned home around midnight we found it fast asleep in its cage in the living room. It had come home, found us not there and let itself in through the cat-flap and went to bed, all by itself. Even though it had always been 'free' in the sense it never had a door on its cage and was free to fly off wherever and whenever it wanted, somehow that incident really touched me as it was like the bird was telling me that it considered our house its home too.

Absolutely amazing creatures and so intelligent. I read once that corvids have similar amounts of neurons in their brains to small monkeys but the folding of the corvid brain is more complex, so those neurons fit into a smaller brain volume. After having the privilege of spending that amount of time with one 'close up' I can certainly believe it.

https://i.imgur.com/qOAN2ro.png

https://i.imgur.com/PO06LII.jpg

It's not just corvids.

I was once lucky in finding a baby sparrow who could not fly yet, but who was cut off from their nesting site and parents.

This sparrow would recognize me and come back to me after hanging out in the park for a day.

> it was like the bird was telling me that it considered our house its home too

I volunteer at a raptor conservation site where most of the birds are free-flown every few days. It is extremely rare for a bird not to come back 'home' of its own accord. There is one bald eagle (fitted with telemetry) who sometimes flies a couple of miles away and then waits to be collected and driven back in a van. The storks literally walk back along a path from one of the displays to their own aviary.

Being fed by the keepers is obviously a factor in them coming back, but it is also worth bearing in mind that for some birds (e.g. a Peregrin falcon) a hunting flight is an extremely energy-intensive activity, a bit like a cheetah sprinting after a gazelle. Such birds in the wild might spend a lot of time perched in a tree waiting for an easy kill, rather than flying just because they can.

Coming back to crows, one respect in which they seem to cognitively outperform dogs is that they understand traffic and vehicles. Crows eating roadkill will hop out of the way when a vehicle passes, and then hop right back when the road is clear again.

Wow, that was a beautiful story. Thank you

That sounds like a great experience. Did you still have a cat residing in the house at the same time as the jackdaw stayed with you? If so, I’m curious to know what kind of relationship they might have had.

I’ve tried to rescue small birds (sparrows, robins, finches) that my cat has caught – but hasn’t killed – despite having two bells on his collar. I found that they either recovered quickly and were able to fly away after a couple of hours or else they died – more often than not. :(

No, we didn't have a cat then. As far as I know, there's something in cat saliva that's toxic to birds, which would explain why they hardly ever survive, after being rescued from cats.

Thanks for the response. I suspected the two species wouldn’t be compatible though I’ve heard of stranger relationships between individual animals.

I searched (DDG) for “cat saliva toxic to birds” and I found this very informative article [1] on the subject of rescuing birds from cats (also bringing the topic back to corvids). It concurs with what you say

> Regardless whether injuries have been found or not, every cat caught bird requires antibiotic treatment.

But more distressingly, it goes on to say that

> Releasing a seemingly uninjured cat caught bird or animal without pain relief and antibiotic treatment is therefore irresponsible and cruel, and will condemn the animal to prolonged suffering and death.

Now I know better. I’ll have to try getting a louder or more sensitive bell that makes it harder for the cat to creep up on its prey. The cat hasn’t brought back any birds or mice in the past couple of months but I don’t know whether that’s because it’s harder to catch prey at this time of year or because he has learned that we’ll just take the injured animal from him and keep him upstairs whenever he does.

1. https://corvid-isle.co.uk/first-aid-cat-caught-birds

Great story. While it lived with you, did it express any opinion about quartz sphinxs?

I had to look that up.

"Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz." (31 letters)

A perfect pangram contains every letter of the alphabet only once and can be considered an anagram of the alphabet.

Upvote for the pair of you. One for the obscure reference, the other for looking it up and saving me the trouble.

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