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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

Confused... you're saying that the crow in the video is not playing with the object? What other interpretation is there? It's not an instinctual nest building activity to go sledding on a foreign object, is it?

I'm a Gen-Xer, and I think that crow is sledding for fun.

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If you look closely its trying to pick at something that it finds curious. Sledding could possibly be an accidental outcome of it being sitting on a thin edge, not the original purpose.

It could have been an accidental outcome the first time. But when the crow then picks up the disc and flies back up to the peak, fails to get any distance on an area with no snow, flies over to a snowy section, and sleds again...

Are you saying it figured out there was less friction with snow in matter of few seconds? All the while it's mind was occupied by something it had in its claws? It could be a genius crow(there has to be variation in intelligence amongst crows too), we will never know. I thought it got irritated with that thin edge quite quickly(being not able to stand comfortably) and hence flew away to look for a thicker one.

No, I think it's unlikely that the person filming caught the crow the first time it began to sled, and what we see in the video is a crow enjoying playing with physics the same way that we do. By "the first time" I meant "the first time the crow slid on something it was standing on, regardless of when that was", although I wasn't very clear about it.

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