I leave shelled peanuts and other bird feed out in the winter, and is fascinating to watch the crows and magpies to crack them open, feed on some of them, then grab two shelled peanuts and fly off with them. They already recognize me coming out in the winter mornings with the bird feed and peanut bags. They wait patiently in the surrounding trees until I'm in the house again. They even see me through the windows watching them and only come down to feed once I am out of sight for them. Truly remarkable.
We also have some pairs of red kites in our area which circle over our fields for prey. The crows don't like them and will try to chase them away, mostly in packs of two to three crows. They are 99% successful in chasing the red kites away because they are more agile in the air and can do more complex flight manouvers. But once one of the crows got to close to the claws of the kite and was killed instantly and dropped down dead. What happened then was even more fascinating. The whole flock of crows gathered around their dead companion and maybe "mourned"? I don't know how to else explain it.
Next winter I will try to befriend them even more, they are so fascinating!
Very clever!
The smartest among them can weigh opportunity costs or count, or both.
Most of the jays will take two peanuts in the shell, go crack the shell open (sounds like they're cracking eggs in the trees, hilarious), cache the nuts (technically the seeds of the legume but anyway nuts from herein for brevity) and then take another unshelled one and fly away. Sometimes they crack open multiple shells and cache as many as they can before the final unshelled one.
The oldest of the jays, who is no longer alive, would regularly show up with so many cached nuts they could not take an unshelled nut. The cached nuts would get in the way.
They would occasionally drop a single peanut from their cache, because it meant they would be able to pick up an unshelled pair; that is they understood on some level the choice involved giving up some food because even more was contained in the shell.
Fascinating.
They, and one of their offspring who is still around, were the only jays that would do it. Though it's unclear if that's because they were "smarter" or simply because they trust us enough to take their time, whereas the other jays seem to act like they're stealing the nuts that belong to the two walking meat bags that live in the box and seem to leave their peanuts lying around.
It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the sidewalk, a pretty sizable rock smacked the pavement next to me, seemingly out of nowhere. If it had hit my head I would have been hurt. I finally look up and see a big crow staring directly down at me - it had dropped it from the power lines, it had seemingly been intentional, maybe as a warning, I don't know. I attributed it to malice towards the vagrants that harass them.
I was amazed at how much intelligence it would take to 1) form a grudge 2) form intent to threaten/harm, 3) formulate a plan using a weapon with cause -> effect to execute intent, 4) wait for opportunity.
I have observed a lot of very intelligent behaviors from these birds but that was the wildest one. I have seen it happen once since, so I'm convinced it isn't an accident.
Crows have also been known to alert predators like wolves to easy prey so they can pick the remains.
Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.
Given that humans aren't obligate carnivores and further more, are capable of advanced chemistry so that even if they were obliged to eat other animals biologically they could just work around this without needing to kill anything - it seems much more compelling to judge us by such a metric than them. We decided that we liked steak so much we would deliberately raise cows just to eat them, the crow can't be anywhere near that "evil" if that's how we're characterising this outcome.
An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.
So I counter you with a practical question: can a crow commit a social transgression that will result in punishment by other crows? My strong suspicion is that the answer is yes, though I would love documentation as it would suggest a crow-cultural definition of morality
I was quite surprised to see that when I mock threatened my wife with a broom in his presence he jumped in to block. Not only that, he took the broom away from me and secured it away. I initially thought it was play, that he wanted to play with the broom. Seems he was just interested in separating me from the broom. He is our household saint.
We have a much younger dog (another rescue) who is not very nice at all to our saint. However, if my body language has even a hint of a threat to our little devil, he sure gets perked up and ready to protect.
This probably comes from pack behavior instinct. Fights inside a pack is bad.
Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?
I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.
But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.
As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.
And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).
So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.
No.
E.g., a bunch of chimps who come upon food will probably become aggressive, whereas a bunch of bonobos will probably get frisky with each other.
They are closely related primates, and their level of intelligence is at least comparable. So it's quite unlikely that the chimps higher level of social aggression is a hard dependency of their level of intelligence.
You think 'selfishness' and 'evil' are equivalent?
But that was poorly punctuated I meant selfishness or even evil not that they were equivalent.
Re matters of degree, I would disagree. The opposite of selfishness would be selflessness. This sounds like a good thing, eg being altruistic is assumed to be 'good', but then, it could also be about imposing one's values on someone, and devaluing the self. It could be a means of control (was forced altruism in communist countries 'good', for example). It seems that 'selflessness' - selfishness's opposite - can also be characterised as 'evil'. If it's not clear whether selfishness or selflessness is evil, it's not clear that it's a matter of degrees.
Ayn Rand argues in the "The Virtue of Selfishness" that selfishness is a good thing, if you want to see a lovely alternative argument.
Meanwhile another crow flies in, picks up a gosling by the neck (i swear there wasn't much difference in size, unreal to see) and flies off with it.
I could see the whole thing coming, was remarkable.
B) Say you have a slow optimizer in a fast world: a lot of the time the optimal solution is going to be some form of computational generalization. Now you have meta-optimization. Life seems to enjoy doing this recursively.
C) Crow intelligence is clearly highly evolved, so you're technically correct, best kind of correct. Though here I'd argue that a very parsimonious answer is single-lifespan learned behavior. You're applying an existing learning system, no new mechanisms needed. (As opposed to positing some new evolved fixed action pattern).
D) There's not even anything stopping it from being planned behavior. Searle is struck out because it is biological; and no one can accuse us of anthropomorphism HERE!
E) Actually, for sparse events, planning using a world model can be more parsimonious. Apply existing model to new problem, again no extra mechanism needed. Which one works better for a particular entity in a particular situation depends on tradeoffs. (For a human example: see eg Memory items vs checklists vs airmanship in eg aviation)
F) That said, I'd even count evolution as a form of intelligence (well... it's an optimizer at least). I will literally die on this hill, and so will you O:-) (unless you represent optimums as valleys) ---> Plot evolution as a dynamic system in phase space, or with your typical hill-climber/gradient descent representations. How much does the trajectory differ from other optimizers? What happens if the 'terrain' is very bumpy with many local optimums? What if it deforms as you cross it?
In other words, they seem to achieve better results with smaller brains than we thought. And yes, crows (in EU) do exhibit some pretty intelligent behavior.
Intelligence seems to have evolved three times on this planet - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. Octopuses have a distributed system rather than one central brain. They all have neurons, but the higher level architecture differs drastically.
Knowing that several different architectures can work is important for AI. There's apparently more than one way to do it.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23521...
See also recent work on honeybees, popularized here https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bumblebees-can-sol...
honeybees are not social insects, but maybe social insects should be added to the list?
Social insects. The original object oriented programming paradigm.
In some environments, that evolution hits limits. Flying birds are limited in brain mass or they can't get airborne. Which may be why corvids don't rule the world.
Before your comment I would have said it emerged twice, but then I had not considered octopuses, they are wicked smart and so unlike other intelligent animals we know.
Regarding that, I'm reminded of another story - on my daily walk near work, there was a dead crow on the pavement. 5 or so crows were standing all around it, doing nothing really. Even me passing close by did not trigger them to fly away or anything, it seemed like they were standing watch on the body. The next day, it was still there, same thing. The 3rd day, it was gone, but the crows were still standing watch in the same manner. I didn't know what to make of it other than it appeared they were mourning or taking part in some type of ingroup ritual. I didn't see it again after that, but it struck me.
One theory is that it drives the creatures to internally model or simulate others intents and reactions, in a way which is a far more regular, consistent, and nuanced than any modeling of various prey or predators.
Further along that path is modeling future-me in plans, and layers of "I know they will know I know they know, so..."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...
Or, to put it another way: if corvid genetics happened upon a brain type that promoted their survival, it doesn't matter if it was "better" or "worse" than the path the monkey/hominid brains took. Genetics took the first bus going in that direction.
tl;dr, the higher cognitive abilities of birds are centered in a different region of the brain compared to mammals, the pallium vs the cortex. Neuron density in the bird pallium is also higher than the comparable density in the mammalian cortex.
[0] Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5182
https://www.aaas.org/membership/member-spotlight/scientist-j...
Ravens are wonderful creatures.
Then, once we noticed a weird nut near the bowl of peanuts. Not sure what type it was, a buckeye I think.
Oddly, we’ve been feeding them for 6 years now and no other gifts!
Someone pondered a correlation between intelligence and some notion of “evil”. I personally believe empathy and altruism are highly connected to intelligence, and the act of giving a gift to another is suggestive of both attributes.
There are also examples of altruism in other species not frequently considered intelligent. Vampire bats will regurgitate food to share with others, even if they are not tied by familial bonds and even if there’s no other tangential benefit to the individual giving up its own nutrition. We have also recently observed female tigers caring for and protecting another female’s cubs while she feeds, which is novel behavior to observe in typically solitary tigers.
I wonder if this was an elder crow whose eyesight has decreased with age and gave out the wrong descriptions to their friends. :D
One thing I didn’t not really account for is that now in the morning when I step outside our new friend really lays on the noises of excitement as he knows a meal is about to be served.
A couple years ago I was doing this and they brought me a chicken head as a gift. Thanks... I guess?
Coins? Screw that. Go right to bills.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60850767-children-of-...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241392678
> In Ray Nayler's speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl.
They hold court over their juvelines and enforce behaviour, and they mourn the passing of members of the community.
I think it's possible the niche encourages large brains. A bit of nature not nurture maybe.
They are tool users. And they can teach offspring lessons learned from humans, and recognize friend and foe. Well mostly: cyclists are routinely mis-cast as foe no matter what. This is why Australian cyclists look like demented wheelie porcupines: cable ties on the helmet keep the eye-peckers at bay.
Last year during fledging season their baby was near the side of the road, in the grass looking lost/hurt/exhausted, so some kind but misguided passers-by (it’s normal, they kick ‘em out of the nest to try and make them fly) picked it up and were going to take it to a wildlife hospital. Mum was watching them from a tree, quite distressed.
I persuaded them I’d look after it and get help if needed, and took the baby back up to the house, then sat down outside and tried to give it back. Baby was by this point clutching my hand and nestling in to me. Mum wandered up, took a look at me holding her kid and I could almost imagine her saying “Ah, yeah you look after him for a while then, I need a break” because she seemed to relax, then went back to the other adults and had a feed before coming back for him!
Also they cache food they don't eat, they hide it, cover with leaves and make sure nobody is watching them, they act very casual. I am not sure if they remember the locations though.
Compared to ravens they have smaller head but I believe it is because they spend so much time near people (at least here in Europe you don't see ravens in cities, they are afraid,for historical reasons, of people and low in numbers) they get smarter and more crafty.
I can recommend a great book about corvids with beautiful illustrations: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300122558/in-the-company...
That cuckoo gets my vote for cleverest.
There is something about intelligence that seems to carry a degree of... moral responsibility, somehow? Though in reality it's just an animal eating another animal, as ever.
In the end, I think a gazelle doesn’t look up at the lion that killed it by outrunning it and the snapping its neck and say “Ah well, got me fair and square!”
I know this is tangential to your point, but lions don't really hunt that way. They ambush, as they could never outrun a gazelle, and then they don't snap its neck unless unintentionally. They tend to just start eating it while it is still alive. It's quite brutal to watch.
Humane hunting is mostly something that only a rich old guy with his night vision goggles and sniper rifle can afford.
Even for farm animals, many cultures perform their sacrifice in ghastly ways.
It is interesting that e.g. "Coyote time" was copied into platform games but in real life if you're not stood on solid ground you fall immediately 'cos Mother Nature doesn't give a shit what's more fun.
Crow White is a hell of a name. Bravo to their parents.
So it is entirely possible that they went "I think I will take the name Crow White, that's hilarious" and a PhD later they're a professor running research on corvids.
Edited to add mention of cultural convention to change names on marriage.
[0] https://naturespy.org - not the best resolution, but plenty good enough for up close video of the birds. I did a fair bit of research and loved the fact that these guys are a social enterprise who put their profits back into conservation projects. Highly recommended.
This one is feeding a dog: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q7Z0yZhyz0s
Teasing an owl: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0i9tjnW7r0
There was a video on youtube about a crow coming to a human and making that sound, also in winter with snow; commenters agreed that it was probably thirsty and was imitating running water that way to get the human to give it water. The human in the video didn't get that. But here in the end we can see the crow eating snow, which may confirm that it is really a way for crows tell when they are thirsty? Not sure what that has to do with the owl--"teasing" might be just testing the owl's capabilities for checking whether killing the owl to drink its blood would be an option? (I guess melting snow for water is increasing the risk for the crow to be cold & run out of energy.)
I wonder if they're just amusing themselves (by being little jerks.)
One day in early spring, I thought I heard a Red Tail Hawk screeching in a tree directly above me. I stood back, searching for it. I never spotted it despite the leaves barely out on the tree. But I did spot a Blue Jay hopping around some lower branches.
When I got home I looked up Blue Jay behavior and found that they do imitate the calls of Red Tail Hawks, among others.
Birds have higher neural density than mammals (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113) so can pack a lot into their tiny heads. I do wonder what they'd have to say, if given the chance.
The fact is that humans are exceedingly quick to find patterns in random data (e.g. horescopes, any form of divination), and that tendency gets amplified when the opportunity to anthropomorphize a cute animal is presented.