11 ms·
How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)
- tomcam 7y agoRavens are huge and they make a sound that to me sounds hilariously like a person doing a bad imitation of a crow.
- hcrisp 7y agoSometimes written "gronk", although they are actually songbirds.
- ycombonator 7y agoThe description is so spot on.
- rags2riches 7y agoIn Swedish, the names are Korp and Kråka. The birds obviously know this and take every chance to introduce themselves.
- cgriswald 7y ago> In Swedish, the names are Korp and Kråka. Strange. I would have guessed Huginn and Muninn.
- rags2riches 7y agoHugin and Munin means Thought and Memory. I can't imagine how that would be onomatopoeia :)
- tyingq 7y agoThere are also grackles, some of them mostly black, that are mistaken for crows. Easier to tell the difference if you can gauge the size. This picture with a 1 foot ruler is helpful: https://www.dshs.state.tx.us/uploadedImages/Content/Prevention_and_Preparedness/idcu/disease/arboviral/westnile/samples/grackle/blackbirds.jpg https://www.dshs.state.tx.us/uploadedImages/Content/Preventi...
- corradio 7y agoSounds timely now that Games of Thrones starts again
- Causality1 7y agoTaxonomically, ravens and crows are not distinct clades. That is to say, not all the species we label "crows" are more closely related to each other than they are to all of the species we label "ravens," and vice versa.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ajross 7y agoYeah. The article seems to be a pretty dry list of traits that distinguish the common raven and american crow, which are specific species, so it makes sense in isolaiton. But it seems to be embracing a frame (echoed in a lot of comments here) that "crows and ravens look similar but are very different birds", which is basically wrong.
- geomark 7y agoAren't ravens the birds with the Spy-vs-Spy behaviors?
- zephyrone 7y agoI read that as "cow" and thought: "Well that can't be too hard. Wonder what this article is about."
- GreeniFi 7y agoAn old English farmer with a strong Dorset accent once explained the difference to me: “If you see a raven, and there’s only one of them, that’s a crow that is. If you see a crow and there’s lots of them, that’s a raven, that is”. Simple!
- quibono 7y agoShouldn't that be the other way round then, according to the article?
- ebg13 7y agoUh, ok, but, FTA: "Ravens often travel in pairs, while crows are seen in larger groups."
- dghf 7y agoI heard/read something similar (possibly in an Enid Blyton novel), but it was contrasting rooks and crows, rather than ravens and crows. Unlike ravens, rooks are much the same size as carrion crows (the typical crow in England), and thus harder to distinguish.
- jimbo1qaz 7y agoTheir website has Javascript which causes every single page to spend 3 seconds stuck at a white screen before showing content. Disabling JS makes content appear nearly instantly.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoIt seems to be just you.
- finetuned 7y agoBirds are so awesome. They make me feel so happy. They are also so much more elegant than anything people made that can fly, I think. I absolutely love them.
- 1_player 7y agoI think you'd like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI63Rbxml5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI63Rbxml5U 4K POV of an eagle soaring through the Alps
- bjelkeman-again 7y agoThanks. Now I need to look at this on a big screen.
- joshklein 7y agoMany will have heard the collective noun for crows via the Simpsons episode reference or otherwise (a “murder of crows”), but ravens get one of my absolute favorites: an “unkindness of ravens”.
- kzrdude 7y agoWhat's the real story of these supposedly normative collective nouns? They don't seem to stem from natural development of the english language, rather seem to have been poetically constructed at some point — is that true?
- kd0amg 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_venery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_vener... > intended as a mark of erudition of the gentlemen able to use them correctly rather than for practical communication
- iak8god 7y agoHere's the relevant page in Archive's scan of The Book of Saint Albans: https://archive.org/details/cu31924031031184/page/n111 https://archive.org/details/cu31924031031184/page/n111
- erikig 7y agoI’ve also heard of a “conspiracy of ravens” used too
- butterfi 7y agoI'd always heard it was a matter of a pinion... (supposedly the pinion feather is longer in Ravens)
- reaperducer 7y agoCrazy to see this posted today. Last night my wife and I were on a reservation in Arizona and watching the birds. She googled this very topic. Then when I looked at HN today, here it is! I showed it to her and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Is Facebook listening to me?” Then I had to explain that HN is human-powered and the chances of Big G and Facebook and HN sharing data is pretty close to zero.
- mathgaron 7y agoGreat example of Baader–Meinhof effect. When you recently hear something and you remark it everywhere. I can assure you that I also read this post and did not talk about crows/raven recently!
- onetimemanytime 7y ago>>Crazy to see this posted today. Game of Thrones ;) ? We need to tell them apart for we might get mixed messages.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoLarge numbers at work :). Congratulations, out of great many people reading HN today, you won in the lottery of "obscure thing I thought about recently is suddenly on the frontpage"!
- OneWordSoln 7y agoSorry, I think we (my kids and myself) got it as we were literally wondering just last week how to tell crows and ravens apart. (We are always scanning for wildlife of all kinds.)
- osrec 7y agoSimilar spooky things happen to me with online adverts. I happened to mention to a friend that I want to adopt a dog. Lo and behold, for the next 5 days, all I see is dog adoption/dog food adverts. It's happened twice to me, and both times, the ads have been so out of the ordinary from my usual ads, that I actually took time to notice them! I'm fairly certain Google is listening in to conversations for ad targeting. I think your case is serendipity!
- andrewl 7y agoI think the entire corvid family is fascinating. They are extremely intelligent. Some of them not only use tools but actually make tools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae#Intelligence
- kyleblarson 7y agoIn Seattle a girl gets gifts from the crows she feeds: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
- esilver 7y agoCorvids don’t just have the capacity for making and using tools but also metatool use, i.e., using one tool on another [0]. In this respect their cognition apparently exceeds many species of primates. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982207017708 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
- wool_gather 7y agoInteresting to note there that initially trying to use the short stick to directly retrieve the reward is considered a mistake; I wonder how many humans would give that a try, though.
- esilver 7y agoI think it’s largely dependent on the parameters of the problem. The researchers noted the significance of the distance between the reward, the first tool, and the second tool. My guess is most humans run two quick analyses: 1) what is the cost of seeing if the short tool can be made to work and 2) what is the cost of retrieving the more distant long tool using the short tool. Human/primate efforts would seem to begin with tool use before escalating to metatool use. All seven of the New Caledonian crows in the experiment engaged in metatool use on their first attempt; only some of them successfully retrieved the second tool but none of them trialed simple tool use.
- 7y ago
- erikig 7y agoCrows sound like “caw” or “ca-caw” and ravens sound like “nevermore”
- krupan 7y agoNot "the N word!" https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Quoth https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Quoth
- projectramo 7y agoI thought I could easily tell the difference till I read this article...
- hirundo 7y agoHave you ever exchanged a look with a stranger and their expression was such that you immediately got a deep impression of their inner life, of their humanity, and felt a connection? That happened to me with a raven, while we were both enjoying a stunning view of a sunset at Petrified Forest National Park. It was a large, old, rumpled, wise seeming creature. Surely that environment primed me for the experience. The mostly likely explanation is that I had a kind of moral hallucination. But it's changed the way I've seen ravens since. I attribute self awareness to them. When they caw what I hear is laughing ... at a ground bound inferior like me. Reading _Mind_of_the_Raven_ only reinforced this feeling. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254704.Mind_of_the_Raven https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254704.Mind_of_the_Raven
- ZhuanXia 7y agoScott Alexander has a good post on bird intelligence here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligen... Though they have much smaller brains, there is evidence to suggest that their brains are 10x more computationally dense.
- djmips 7y agoBirds are on a better process.
- anoncake 7y agoMaybe cooling is also a factor, so we are constrained by our brain's surface area.
- hopler 7y agoTo some extent brain "power" goes with surface area, right? Granted the surface is highly folded in 3 dimensions. But I think larger brains have a lot more "non thinking" matter to support the complexity of maintaining a larger neural network. On the other hand, effective thinking-power may be superlinear in neuron count. Or perhaps sublinear.
- subroutine 7y agoHere's a very cool Google Creative Labs experiment that used tSNE to organize thousands of bird chirps/songs/calls. The result is an interactive map that groups similar bird sounds (click/tap to play any of the sounds): https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/bird-sounds/view/ https://experiments.withgoogle.com/ai/bird-sounds/view/ source code: https://github.com/googlecreativelab/aiexperiments-bird-sounds https://github.com/googlecreativelab/aiexperiments-bird-soun...
- drharby 7y agoI feel like these kind of cool tech demos paired with a highly motivated and technically savvy phd student would lead to some interesting models in research papers with accompanying demos.
- juletide 7y agoOn a related note, there's an app that will identify bird species based on photos that you upload (http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/photo-id/ http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/photo-id/), and it's powered by "Visipedia", a collaboration between a Caltech and Cornell research group (https://vision.cornell.edu/se3/projects/visipedia/?__hstc=75100365.1faf22dbc501863eea5790689e4fb775.1478881109453.1480518577615.1480622596812.13&__hssc=75100365.1.1480622596812&__hsfp=2912946381 https://vision.cornell.edu/se3/projects/visipedia/?__hstc=75...). I remember how nascent the tech was when they first started releasing it in 2011ish and it's incredible how good it is now. Really awesome stuff.
- ravedave5 7y agoThat is really cool. Also, if you click and drag you get the sound of a roller coaster.
- tedmcory77 7y agoAt the Grand Canyon National Park they told us that ravens are the only animal allowed at wolf kills; this is because they train wolf pups while the parents are off hunting so theyre recognized.
- nyolfen 7y agowhat do you mean by train wolf pups?
- esilver 7y agoMy guess would be that the ravens demonstrate effective scavenging behavior to the wolf pups. Interestingly, both wolves and ravens engage in observational learning of food acquisition behaviors [0]. I think most of us would assume that wolf pups have an innate scavenging ability; this is probably wrong. [0] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/aff0/dca479ca58868890d903cd8b1a25421cb4e4.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/aff0/dca479ca58868890d903cd...
- boulos 7y agoI’ve found this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/k9-wTnqIidY https://youtu.be/k9-wTnqIidY more helpful, as it spends more time showing you both (and obviously you can hear the sounds).
- CasualKitty 7y agoI like how he pitches his wine video in the beginning.
- mongol 7y agoIn Northern Europe, the subspecies Corvus cornix, hooded crow, is easy to tell apart from the raven due to its grey body parts. For this reason there is never any doubt what you see, but this also has imprinted the other body differences in my mind. I don't think it is hard to tell the black Corvus corone from raven due to this.
- OneWordSoln 7y agoThey are beautiful and it almost looks like silver. I loved seeing them when I was in Finland.
- cr4ig_ 7y agoIf on some midnight dreary there is suddenly a tapping, as of someone rapping, at your chamber door... It's probably a raven. Nevermore.
- jjgreen 7y agoFrench crows are bigger than English crows, and behave rather differently. An English crow on a pavement will hop out of the way of an approaching pedestrian, a French crow will stand there and look at you, as if to say "Yeah, do you want some?"
- borgdr 7y agoWish I'd known this when I was randomly attacked by raven or crow in BC, then I'd only dislike one of them.
- OneWordSoln 7y agoJust because you don't understand its reasons doesn't make it a random occurance. I'm guessing you were near a nest or a fledgling, but that's just my non-educated guess. Another possibility is that you looked like a former 'enemy' of crows. Crows can remember people who mess with them for up to two years and seem to be able to communicate that information among their peers. There is an excellent documentary about that behavior and it may have even been about scientists in the BC area. They wore masks to test whether the information could be passed down from generation to generation. They found one crow offspring that still recognized the mask its parents had been trained on. I believe it was called "The Intelligent World of Crows". It was excellent.
- Tiktaalik 7y agoA bigger challenge is to differentiate a Northwestern Crow from an American Crow. > It is smaller than the American Crow and has a more nasal call, but it is so similar that the two may in fact be the same species. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northwestern_Crow/overview# https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northwestern_Crow/overvi... I didn't even realize that my area had an apparently different crow than everywhere until I bought a birding book.
- juletide 7y agoActually, recent research indicates that these two species began differentiating themselves a long time ago, but their lineages have since converged: they now interbreed freely and there's no reliable way to tell the two species apart: https://twitter.com/dlslager/status/1072353359041085440 https://twitter.com/dlslager/status/1072353359041085440 It's been really interesting to talk to birders I trust about this. The rough consensus is, most people think they're the same species and will get merged back together soon, but some are very attached to the distinction between the two, haha. Birds are so cool! I think it's fascinating that we're still learning new things about this stuff all the time.
- Tiktaalik 7y agoHm the story from the posted tweet makes sense to me. Damn that is really cool.
- RickJWagner 7y ago"Listen closely to the birds’ calls. Crows give a cawing sound. But ravens produce a lower croaking sound." Also, the raven is the only one that repeats "Nevermore!'
- porjo 7y agoThis article pertains to North America. In Australia there is less distinction between crows and ravens. Australian crows/ravens are infamous for their loud and obnoxious call precisely timed to interrupt your afternoon nap!
- mjcohen 7y agoI want to tell a raven from a writing desk.
- dajohnson89 7y agothat is the best comment section I've ever seen.
- p1necone 7y agoResearchers for the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority found over 200 dead crows near greater Boston recently, and there was concern that they may have died from Avian Flu. A Bird Pathologist examined the remains of all the crows, and, to everyone's relief, confirmed the problem was definitely NOT Avian Flu. The cause of death appeared to be vehicular impacts. However, during the detailed analysis it was noted that varying colors of paints appeared on the bird's beaks and claws. By analyzing these paint residues it was determined that 98% of the crows had been killed by impact with trucks, while only 2% were killed by an impact with a car. MTA then hired an Ornithological Behaviorist to determine if there was a cause for the disproportionate percentages of truck kills versus car kills. The Ornithological Behaviorist very quickly concluded the cause: when crows eat road kill, they always have a look-out crow in a nearby tree to warn of impending danger. The scientific conclusion was that while all the lookout crows could say "Cah", none could say "Truck."
- virusduck 7y agoCtrl-F jackdaw ...Here's the thing...