12 strange reasons why crows and ravens are the best birds, no question
We’re sure you have your favourite animal. It could even be a really good idea. But corvids like crows, magpies, and ravens are really something. In fact, they are among the smartest animals on the planet.
Here are some of the best examples of how smart and beautiful these animals can be.
1. Crows can figure out what happened and why
In an experiment with New Caledonian crows, the birds were put in an area where a stick would come out of a hide. They used two different situations. In the first, a person was seen going into the hide before the stick moved and leaving after it did. In the second one, the person stayed out of sight.
In the first, the crows were much more calm after the human left. They correctly linked the movement of the stick to the presence of the human. They would go looking for food and act like normal animals. In the second, the crow had no idea why the stick was there, so it stayed cautious.
Biologist Alex Taylor says, “These results really seem to show that crows act very similarly to humans when they have to think about a hidden cause-and-effect relationship.”
2. Crows know that water moves.
In an experiment with tubes that was published in PLOS One, scientists found that New Caledonian crows can not only tell the difference between water and sand, but they also know how water moves.
The test involved water-filled tubes with a treat floating on top that the dog couldn’t reach. The crows put enough rocks or other heavy things in the tubes to move the food closer to them.
They were also given different situations, like tubes with different levels of water. The crows chose the tube that got them food the easiest way.
Researchers said that their success rate was about the same as that of seven-year-old children.
3. Crows hold grudges and tell other crows about them
Have you ever wondered why some crow researchers wear masks? Crows can remember human faces, especially the faces of people who have hurt them.
So, if you want to record how crows react to bad things, like being caught and tagged, you shouldn’t use your real face. If you do, the angry flock will yell at you every time you get close, as biologist John Marzluff found and wrote about in a 2011 paper.
Even better, he did. A few years later, he found out that crows don’t just keep that grudge to themselves; they also tell other crows about it.
About 26% of the crows scolded the person wearing the danger mask in the first two weeks after they were caught. About 15 months later, that number had gone up to 30.4%.
Three years after the first trapping, the number of scolding crows had grown to 66 percent because nothing had been done to help them.
4. When a crow dies, it has a funeral
When a crow dies, other crows will often gather around and make a lot of noise, just like people do when someone dies. Before 2015, no one knew why. Then, crow researcher Kaeli Swift used crowd funding to try to find out why.
Her conclusion, which was published in the journal Animal Behaviour, was that crows gather around the bodies of their dead friends to learn about danger.
And it works. The city of Chatham, Ontario is in the middle of a crow migration route, and the crows are a problem there. Every effort to get rid of them has failed, even when pellet guns were used. The crows figured out how to fly just high enough to get away from the fire.
5. Ravens are smart enough to be suspicious.
A study that came out in early 2016 found that ravens have what is called “the theory of mind.” This means that they can recognize their own mental states and extrapolate that others have mental states, too, and that those mental states may be different from their own.
Ravens like to hide food for later, and when other ravens are around, they do it more carefully.
To see if this was true, ravens were taught to use a peephole to watch a person hide food in a room next door. Then they were put in the second room with the food and watched in two ways: with the peephole closed and a loudspeaker playing raven cries, and with the peephole open and no raven cries.
They acted just like they could see another raven.
In their paper, the researchers wrote that this meant, “that they can generalize from their own experience using the peephole as a thief and predict that competitors who can hear their caches might be able to see them. So, we say that they show “seeing” in a way that can’t be explained by the tracking of gaze cues.”
6. Crows can solve complex, multi-step puzzles
As part of a BBC Two show called Inside the Animal Mind, scientists put crows to the test with the most complicated animal puzzle ever made.
And not crows raised in a lab. The crows were caught one at a time from the wild and kept for only three months.
This one, who is called “007,” seems to be a genius. To get the food reward, the puzzle had eight steps that had to be done in a very specific order. He had to find the tools and then use them to move on to the next part of the puzzle. He knew how to use each tool on its own, but he had never had to do that before.
Watch the video, please. It’s really good.
7. Crows can make tools
All right, crows can use tools. Great!
But what do they do if there is nothing available? It turns out that the clever little buggers just make their own. In 2015, scientists said they had the first video evidence of crows making tools in the wild. They did this by putting a specially made spy camera on the crows’ tail feathers and filming them.
They were seen breaking off twigs from trees, removing the bark and leaves, and making hooks out of the nodes. Then, they used these tools to look for food in tight spaces.
“It’s easy to miss the behavior. When I first watched the video, I didn’t notice anything interesting. I didn’t notice this fascinating behavior until I watched it again frame by frame. Not just once, but twice! “Jolyon Troscianko, a researcher, said that.
“In one scene, a crow drops its tool and then quickly picks it up off the ground, which shows that they care about their tools and don’t just throw them away after one use.”
8. Ravens punish selfish peers by excluding them from the group.
When someone in your group of friends acts like an idiot, you might not invite them to social events, unfriend them on Facebook, or ignore their messages. Ravens don’t have Facebook, but they treat other ravens who are jerks in the same way.
In a 2015 study, researchers from the University of Vienna gave ravens a task that would only pay off if they worked together to pull on ropes to raise a platform with two pieces of cheese, one for each raven.
If one raven stole its friend’s cheese as well as its own, the other raven wouldn’t work with it anymore. However, it would work with other ravens who played fair.
“Such a sophisticated way to keep your partner in line has only been seen in humans and chimpanzees before, and it’s a first for birds,” said Jorg Massen, who led the study.
9. Crows can control themselves
Crows aren’t just driven by instinct; they can feel excitement and self-control if it means getting a bigger reward at the end.
In 2014, a test was made based on the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, which was done in the 1960s to study how children deal with waiting to get what they want. The first step was to find out what kind of food the crows liked best. The researchers gave them grapes, bread, sausage, fried fat, and other treats.
Next, they were given a snack and the option of trading it if they were willing to wait. They could either get a better snack (meat instead of a grape, for instance) or more of the same snack.
The birds would rather wait until a better snack was available, but they wouldn’t if it was just more of the same. In some cases, they waited up to ten minutes for a better snack. The fact that they waited for better quality instead of more food showed that they did not have to, but rather wanted to wait.
10. Ravens can make plans and trade for things they need
When ravens are taught how to use tools, they can tell when something is valuable and save it for later. To find out, scientists taught ravens to get a treat by putting a tool into a tube that stuck out of a box.
Then they took the tool and the box away and came back an hour later with a few things for the raven to choose from, one of which was the tool. After another 15 minutes, the box was brought back. Eighty percent of the time, the raven had picked the right tool. When the box was returned 17 hours later, the experiment was done again, and the ravens were successful 90% of the time.
For the next part, ravens had been taught to give a human a token in exchange for food. After an hour, they were given three trays with objects to choose from. One of the objects was the token, and the other was a low-quality snack. Together, they were given a total of three tokens.
On average, they chose the token about 73 percent of the time. The trader would come back in 15 minutes, and the raven would trade the tokens for the prize.
“This study suggests that ravens make plans for the future outside of their current sensory contexts and that they are as good a planners as apes in terms of being able to plan across different domains,” the paper said in its conclusion.
11. Ravens remember the nice people who have treated them well.
You know how crows can be mean? Well, corvids also remember the nice things people do for them. There was that cute story about a little girl who fed crows, and then they started bringing her shiny things. There was also a scientific study on the subject.
Again, ravens were trained to trade a snack that wasn’t as good (bread) for a snack that was better (cheese). Then, two people came with the cheese to exchange it for the bread. When the crow handed over the bread, one experimenter was ready to give the cheese. The other person in the experiment ate the cheese after they were given the bread.
Then, after a break of two days and then one month, three people—the fair person, the unfair person, and a neutral control—entered the enclosure. A piece of bread was given to the raven as a trade. Most of the ravens chose to trade with the fair experimenter, which shows that they remembered being tricked out of tasty cheese and weren’t going to let it happen again.
12. Ravens use gestures to communicate
Before they can talk, babies use gestures to communicate. For example, by pointing at the things they want. Researchers had never seen this kind of communication in any other species besides primates until they saw wild ravens doing it.
Simone Pika of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and Thomas Bugnyar of the University of Vienna found that they use their beaks like hands.
They watched 38 interactions between two ravens. In 25 of those interactions, one raven picked up an object and showed it to the other raven, and in 10 of those interactions, one raven gave an object to the other raven.
“Most of the time, these different gestures were meant for partners of the opposite sex, and the recipients often turned to look at the object and the signalers. After that, the ravens started to talk to each other, for example by billing each other or working together to move an object “researchers reported.
