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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Crows are impressive animals. The more we learn about animal intelligence, the more I wonder what exactly it is that we do with all this extra brain matter we lug around.

http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/crows-could-be-the-key-to...

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Crows can do amazing things; a documentary shows crows dropping nuts on roads, waiting for passing cars to crack them open.

But the problem then is to get onto the road to eat the content of the nut without being run over.

Well, crows learned to drop the nuts at pedestrian crossings, and wait for read lights stopping all cars, to go collect the reward. Problem solved.

I have observed crows doing this with chestnuts on a crossing. And also a crow burying a chestnut, noticing that it was observed by another crow, then pretending that it buried the nut in another spot and vigorously defending the fake location from the other crow.

But can they beat chickens at tic-tac-toe?

http://www.nytimes.com/video/nyregion/100000001595360/tick-t...

I live in a neighborhood that has lots of crows and lots of walnut trees and not much car traffic. The neighborhood crows have figured out that dropping the walnuts in the intersections increases the chances of them getting crushed.

I'm running my own little social experiment: whenever I'm walking in the 'hood and I see a crow drop a walnut, I walk over and crush it. So far the crows have not started dropping nuts near me when they see me, but I have hopes :-)

Related, crow vending machine: http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of...

as soon as crows start performing experiments on humans, I might share your wonder.

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