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Comment by ngruhn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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My dad had a friend who worked at a remote logging area and tossed his bread crust to a raven that was perched by the road. Next day, the raven swooped past his truck as he drove past. Eventually he stopped and dug something out of his lunchbox and gave it to him.

Then every day for months, he would just hold a snack in his fingers and the raven would swoop down and grab it as he drove past. Pretty amazing to think about. That level of foresight, adherence to a routine, not giving up (days off, etc).

I knew somebody who had logged in Alaska and they swore that this one town had a huge crow who would hang out by the town's welcome sign and...welcome the visitors. Apparently crows who spend enough time around people will sometimes mimic human speech and this particular crow had been taught to welcome people in.

If you like that crow you'll probably get a kick out of Ngarritj the corella: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbSxc6Y1aVA

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.

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.

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 managed to get a recording once: https://drive.google.com/file/d/109wzdIsVW7hZwX1-8M3IioUMr49...

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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/60530212

> You literally neeed to run for your life if a local magpie decides you are not to be trusted!

Ah yes, I am familiar with this Bluey lore

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.

https://comicskingdom.com/bizarro/2000-12-24

Thanks, I appreciate it!

If memory serves, it's been shown that they go for the eyes.

Down here in Tasmania we have Black Currawongs (strepera fuliginosa) that patrol around on bin night calling out to each other when they find a wheelie bin they can smell food scraps in. An individual bird can open the lids on their own. Our neighbours countered this by zip tying full 600ml water bottles to the lid handles. Heavy enough that a bird couldn't lift the lid, but not heavy enough to stop the lid opening when the truck lifts the bin.

In response to this, the birds now work together in groups of 3 to open the lids. So people started zip tying two water bottles to the bins... the birds can't get past that as there isn't enough room for them to work in a group of 6.

Me, I just put some green waste on the top of my bin before I take it out. We've also replaced our front lawn with native plants and there's lots of things in there that the birds like to eat. When something in there goes to seed we'll often have 20+ currawongs.

They always leave my bins alone.

> they'll tap on your window or walk into your house through an open door to tell you off

Around here, they come in and try to sell me magazine subscriptions.

Amazing. In contrast, my dog Chip will drink until he pukes unless I tell him to slow down.

To be fair, many humans do that on a Friday night

Tangentially, ravens sound like humans doing a bad imitation of ravens

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.

Only feed them away from your house. These are smart birds, you don’t want them tracking you home ;)

They definitely know where you live

They also know what you did last summer

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.

That’s an Aesop’s fable (the Crow and the Pitcher).

https://read.gov/aesop/012.html

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."

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...

What a fitting name Christopher has

You’ll get a kick out of the concept of nominative determinism, then!

What a fitting name the concept of nominative determinism has.

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.

I was friends with a Moran with a BS, MS, and PhD in EE from Stanford.

RIP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym

Speaking of animal intelligence: I have always been impressed by the short-term memory of chimpanzees, which outperforms that of humans:

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.

Unfortunately that was a flawed study. They paired trained chimps with people who saw the task for the first time.

It was later repeated, and if given the same training, humans still outperform chimps in this task.

Any source?

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.

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.

> But after a few days I had flock of crows following me everywhere through the city. That was a bit too much.

Be thankful. How many people you know are part of a murder?

This deserves far, far more upvotes than it got ;-)

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.

My desire to befriend some crows is only increased by this comment.

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.

Your username sounds like something a pidgeon would say...

haha true

So how did you make it stop?

I really tried to befriend some crows but in the end I only got a pigeon ... and in-between I had some really destructive ravens.

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.

Yeah I was already feeling like this year was my crow year, and now I'm understanding how easy it is??

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.

https://www.audubon.org/magazine/apparently-magpies-and-crow...

> I had flock of crows following me everywhere through the city

That sound so cool, like main character in your story.

Right? Guy has his own Air Force!

Don't piss them off.

https://youtu.be/EQG5fi-2xns

Maybe it had the widely known Aesop's fable in his training set, so this was a skewed evaluation.

Another member of the birds are not real community in the wild.

Or just an Odin worshiper.

Or maybe it broke into the library to find the book that had the answer.

The crow and rocks experiment was a staple “moral story” when I was a child in India. Interesting that someone actually validated it!

This a classic story from Aesop's Fables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_and_the_Pitcher It's been passed down for a few thousand years.

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.

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.

One of my favourites as well. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2IBayVsbz8

Seems the setup for one of those “the crows have eyes” movies.

https://www.thecrowshaveeyes.com/

I’m quite sure all crows have eyes.

That screenshot from the movie looks terribad and I’m not sure if I want to google it.

My friend saw crows lure a stalking cat into the path of a car, laughed, then ate its road killed carcass.

I saw that video of the experiment with the thin glass as well, it's been years since then but I still tell people about it. Crows are awesome!

We found rick and the two crows

They outsmarted you!

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