I am working on the Crow Nickels (chronicles), a series of novels about crows working to save birdkind from extinction. My stories are fiction but I’ve read real research on the corvid family. Here’s some of what I have learned.
Corvids consist of crows, ravens, jays, magpies and treepies. They are considered among the most intelligent of birds (the parrot family is also pretty bright). New Caledonian crows are said to be among the most intelligent, with several being studied (by a real live princess! Auguste Marie Philippa, Prinzessin von Bayern!) in Austria. Yeah, that’s Austria, which is about half the world away from New Caledonia, a collectivity of France in the southwest Pacific ocean. They test crows for intelligence there, too, but I’m more familiar with the studies in Haidl, Austria. People are especially impressed with the New Caledonian crows’ tool-building. Nature
The construction of novel compound tools through assemblage of otherwise non-functional elements involves anticipation of the affordances of the tools to be built. Except for few observations in captive great apes, compound tool construction is unknown outside humans, and tool innovation appears late in human ontogeny. We report that habitually tool-using New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) can combine objects to construct novel compound tools. We presented 8 naïve crows with combinable elements too short to retrieve food targets. Four crows spontaneously combined elements to make functional tools, and did so conditionally on the position of food. One of them made 3- and 4-piece tools when required.
Here’s more research, showing that crows are not just good at tool use, but that successful tool use improves their mood! Yeah, how do you tell if a bird is in a good mood? The scientists have a way for determining that, using a glass half-full (optimism, good mood) versus glass half-empty (pessimism, bad mood) approach, where the half-full glass is replaced by an ambiguously situated box.
Do crows also make art? Some people think so:
Stuart Dahlquist is in Seattle, so I assume the crows are as well, despite the German writing on the ashtray.
Seattle is a center for crow research. There’s the corvidresarch.blog run by Kaeli Swift (what a fantastic bird name), PhD. Her postings are wonderful; here are a few paragraphs from a recent post:
What are they thinking about?
Watching a crow eagerly eye me for a peanut, I can’t help but wonder what it’s thinking about. Is it thinking the same thing as its flock mate, or is it having its own experience? Is it aware of me? Of itself? The conscious experience is such a fundamental part of humanity, it’s nearly impossible for most of us to envision life without it. And by extension, its hard for us to imagine that animals don’t experience consciousness too. But the fact remains that scientifically investigating consciousness, especially in non-human animals, has been slow and contentious. Among birds, this research has been all the more elusive. Which is why a study looking at subjective consciousness in carrion crows by Nieder et al. (2020)1 made an enormous splash this past fall, and resulted in a lot of misleading headlines. So why has consciousness been so difficult to study and how did this team attempt to do it?
What they found is that like primates, crows exhibit a two-stage process, where neuronal activity during Stage I mostly reflects the intensity of the physical stimulus, followed by a second spike in activity that reflected their perception. The patterns of activity in Stage II were so consistent, that the researchers could predict whether the crows would say they saw the light or not by looking at this activity alone. Most importantly, while the responses of the two birds were the same if the light intensity was bright and unambiguous, when shown faint lights, the two birds responded differently. Meaning that despite being shown the exact same stimulus, the two birds had different subjective experiences of whether they had seen it or not. There were also instances of false positives, where the birds indicated that they had seen a light that wasn’t really there. In these cases their brains behaved during Stage II just as they did when they had actually seen a bright light. This is important because it further demonstrates that the brain activity the researchers were measuring correlated with the crows’ subjective experience, rather than as a result of the intensity of the stimulus itself.
I think the conceit that other species are not conscious is ridiculous. How elitist, to assume we’re the only species that makes tools, that creates art, that thinks, that communicates! We need to have more respect for “bird-brains.” They even play!
And there’s a great example of training crows to pick up trash at a theme park in France. Of course they have less to do because of the pandemic.
Corvids also interact with other species — not just us! These are some observations about interactions between ravens and wolves, by Brad Bulin, a senior naturalist at Yellowstone.
Ravens and wolves have a special relationship. Called “wolf birds” by various cultures, ravens have important ties to wolves. Like many scavengers, the common raven (Corvus corax) is especially tied to large predators that serve as potential food providers. Wolves provide many Yellowstone species a year-round food not necessarily available prior to their re-establishment in the park: carrion. Bears, eagles, magpies, and several other species also benefit from this food source.
Ravens begin eating carrion quickly, usually arriving not soon after a kill, but rather—because of their close association with wolves—being there when the kill is made. As many as 135 ravens have been seen on one carcass! Interestingly, these birds will not only eat some of the food, but cache (store) as much as possible. It is believed that in some cases the raven, not the wolf, will harvest the majority of a large animal carcass.
My speculation is that the ravens and the wolves may be working together. The ravens, with their aerial perspective, may be able to locate prey far more easily than the wolves. (I have this written up in my second, not-yet-published, volume in the Crow Nickels series.)
Corvids are found around the world. Most are doing pretty well, although there are certain exceptions, such as the Hawaiian crow, which has gone extinct in the wild, probably due to disease (fowlpox). These birds still exist in captivity and
there are plans to reintroduce them. Many corvids died, too, when the West Nile virus struck; they are especially susceptible, more so than other species. Others, such as azure jays, are suffering due to loss of habitat in Brazil.
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Lesley the Bird Nerd has plenty of youtube videos. She has made special friends with some blue jays, another type of corvid.
Alas, her videos would not embed, which could be because I am currently outside the US (the rules strike me as capricious). But she has a lot of information about corvids.
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I may be watching the birds, but they are also watching me. (There’s a lot of research showing how they recognize our faces and even some about how they may be listening to our conversations.)
Here’s what I see.
I am writing this from a real Swiss Alp, and through the window of my little office I have observe three types of corvids. First are the carrion crows, Corvus corone. I often see two or three in the field beside the house, especially when sheep are around. They perch on the backs of sheep when the sheep are grazing in that field.
Magpies live near us year round. They have a larger family group, maybe about a dozen. They are really noisy, chattering, well, like magpies, walking around on the roof, sometimes landing on
the balustrade, and always, always flying away in alarm if they happen to catch me looking at them. This is one reason I have had such trouble snapping pictures (I am also a miserable photographer). If I do so much as exchange my reading glasses for my regular glasses, so I can see them better, they take wing.
Our chalet is at the end of a cul-de-sac, and we transformed it into a large terrace so cars, including ours, could easily turn around. For years I have found broken walnut shells on the stones, and I always looked up, searching for a walnut tree. I have never found it, and no longer think the tree is directly above us. The corvids – at least the crows and the magpies – are bringing the walnuts to our terrace and dropping them on the hard pavement in order to break them open. I have not seen them do this, but I have seen them fly away with nutmeats in their beaks.
As it’s winter, the higher elevations are covered with snow. Alpine choughs, who live higher (we’re only at 800 meters) on the alp come in great swarms, perhaps a flock of a hundred birds, for a foraging rotation. I can recognize them because of their yellow beaks, which makes them easy to tell apart from them carrion crows.
Thanks for letting me share some of what I have learned about these clever birds.
I do a lot of other writing. My most recent offering: Hunters of the Feather, a story about a thinker-linker crow who wants to save birdkind from extinction. (It’s really good! It’s really cheap! Buy it! Review or rate it positively!) My less recent stories, based on Jane Austen novels and others on Greek mythology, can be found here.