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A bird feeder that accepts bottle caps for food
- Lostidentity 6y agoCool article, but it may be worth linking to the original write up with more technical details. https://www.hackster.io/hfor62/training-wild-birds-to-trade-litter-for-food-8f9a55 https://www.hackster.io/hfor62/training-wild-birds-to-trade-... Either way, great read for a Sunday.
- anotherevan 6y agoI remember some study with training mice to be fed when pressing a button. They found that if they get a morsel every time they press the button they get bored of it. However if there was some randomisation as to how often they got a treat, they would sit there pressing the button all the time.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThat's a Skinnerbox, named after the psychologist B. F. Skinner who did the experiment. It works on humans too, which is why RPG games drop random amounts of loot and xp.
- anotherevan 6y agoThanks for that. So... I wonder if it'll work on magpies.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThe idea behind a Skinnerbox is it keeps the subjects performing the action even after they're satiated. So, if you wanted the magpies to keep collecting bottle caps even after they've had enough to eat, it might be helpful. Based on my childhood memories of feeding birds, I don't expect the birds getting full would be a major concern.
- iSnow 6y agoRight? Birds are like my dogs, basically food black holes. Besides, the amount of bottle caps the magpies in the experiment would be able to find in the wild would be a limiting factor keeping them on their toes.
- tomaskafka 6y agoSince it works on mice and on humans, and magpies are somewhere in the middle, I'd bet yes :).
- theptip 6y agoI don’t think the result was that they got bored of it while it was producing rewards, it’s that when the reward stops coming, they very quickly stop the behavior. If you have unpredictable but net-positive rewards, then you keep pulling the lever for longer when it stops paying out. So if you want to train a dog or other animal with a clicker or just with treats, the optimal strategy is probably not to give them treats every time they do the behavior.
- pipley 6y agoYep, the variable reward schedule https://gamification21.wordpress.com/learning-content-3/16-reward-schedules/ https://gamification21.wordpress.com/learning-content-3/16-r... It's an incredibly powerful effect. Slot machines and the "smart" social media timelines (rather than pure chronological) are the apotheosis of this in humans. Switching both Facebook and Twitter to pure chronological view makes them way less addictive as the element of surprise is all but eliminated on most people's timelines. The platform no longer presents you with something different each time you pull down to refresh.
- ufo 6y agoThe article doesn't say much about how he thought the magpies to use the machine. Does anyone know where I can find more info about that?
- macintux 6y agohttps://www.hackster.io/hfor62/training-wild-birds-to-trade-litter-for-food-8f9a55 https://www.hackster.io/hfor62/training-wild-birds-to-trade-...
- cl42 6y agoThis is really neat. The "guy" is Hans Forsberg and his Youtube channel is great: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtkv3wuEP-Veur4iYJWkBgA/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtkv3wuEP-Veur4iYJWkBgA/vid... Lots of insightful videos on how he builds his devices and trains the birds to use them. For example, a simpler device where pressing a red button dispenses food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alpCl6xDSRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alpCl6xDSRU
- miniatureape 6y agoThis reminds me of https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87878028 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=878780... Although I seem to remember reading that the vending machine never worked as well as the inventor said.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoThere was a similar project — under the delightful name “Crowbar” — to train crows to gather cigarette butts. Ran out of funding. https://www.crowdedcities.com https://www.crowdedcities.com
- oh_sigh 6y agoYeah, I've seen multiple instances of people claiming to have done this, but they always turn out to be scams. I believe a crow could he easily trained to move a bottle cap already on a table to the reward mechanism, but so far no one has ever shown birds coming with wild caught bottle caps to get more food.
- markdown 6y agoThere's a video showing just that in his channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtkv3wuEP-Veur4iYJWkBgA/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtkv3wuEP-Veur4iYJWkBgA/vid...
- fallinghawks 6y agoYes. The experiment was far more controlled than he implied. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORRECTIONS-1.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12letters-t-CORR... I know one of the people who worked alongside Klein (and Unidan) at Binghamton U. She says wild crows are highly neophobic and it's hard to train them to accept the presence of a big machine and do stuff with it. (Our conversation was quite a few years ago so I'm a bit vague.) There was a lot of academic disagreement and fallout when Klein went forward with his Ted talk and made the experiment out to be much more exciting than it was.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThis is cool, but he needs to be careful wrt the exchange mechanism. If he sets this up in California but doesn't allow the magpies to set their own wages + hours he could be on the hook for healthcare and FICA contributions.
- jeofken 6y agoLuckily it’s in Sweden where there is no minimum wage law and no need to declare when the income is as low as for these birds. Also, the labour law is speciecist and does not apply to individuals who don’t pass as “human”
- cogburnd02 6y agoCalifornia, where electrical tape causes cancer...
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoso monetizing the idea, obviously money for food, if magpies find money on the ground they bring it to you, get food. soda cans for food. I was thinking lottery tickets for food, but probably not that worthwhile.
- Symbiote 6y agoThe soda can, in Sweden where this is, has a deposit of 1kr, about 15¢.
- Eyght 6y agoOne thing to keep in mind is that birds generally don't follow human law, and will certainly find creative ways to source materials from stores, people's pockets, cars, homes etc.
- Quekid5 6y ago> I was thinking lottery tickets for food, but probably not that worthwhile. Also, turning in a lottery ticket you didn't actually purchase may be considered fraud. (Obviously depends on location.)
- kortilla 6y agoWhat? In what jurisdiction is a lottery ticket bound to the purchaser?
- dcuthbertson 6y agoIn the US, if the lottery ticket is signed it then belongs to the signer
- kortilla 6y agoThat has nothing to do with purchasing it.
- Quekid5 6y agoThere have been cases in the UK, I believe, where a couple picked up a discarded winning lottery ticket and tried to claim it. I think they got a suspended sentence, at least. IIRC, video surveillance showed that it wasn't them who had purchased the ticket. (Or at least that they couldn't have.) I don't necessarily agree with it, but that is the law in some countries/jurisdictions.
- throwaway2245 6y agoI think it's pretty gross and unethical to train crows to pick up cigarette butts (and likely poison them).
- missedthecue 6y agoWhich part of the butt would poison them? They're not smoking it.
- throwaway2245 6y agoHumans often get oral and gastrointestinal cancers from chewing tobacco, without smoking it. Not to mention the filter is designed to trap tar, nicotine and other carcinogens. From Wikipedia: "Children who ingest 6 cigarette butts, or a total of 0.5 mg/kg of nicotine should be admitted to a hospital." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_filter#Health_risks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_filter#Health_risks Crows weigh ~1kg and cigarette butts ~5mg, i.e. ingesting a single cigarette butt is 10 times what would send a human to hospital.
- missedthecue 6y agoSo the fear is that they might ingest one?
- notRobot 6y ago> Crows weigh ~1kg and cigarette butts ~5mg, i.e. ingesting a single cigarette butt is 10 times what would send a human to hospital. This assumes that humans and crows are physiologically identical, which they are not. Are the affected by tobacco in the same manner? How much do they end up injesting from the typical butt?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway2245 6y ago> This assumes that humans and crows are physiologically identical I accept that this is partially relevant, but: Since humans choose to consume tobacco, and animals including birds generally won't (hence tobacco plants are becoming invasive), if anything we should expect humans to have a higher tolerance and crows to have a relatively lower tolerance for tobacco products. Is your point that it should be considered ethical until your questions have been exhausted? That isn't a good standard of ethics.
- sto_hristo 6y agoMagpies are amazing. They are one of the very few that can recognize their own mirror images. I will never forget how one morning, on my regular run, i saw a group of magpies on the ground, right beside the road. There were 4 magpies forming a line, they were looking at two other magpies just in front of them. One of the two magpies appeared to be dead - was laying flat on the ground, while the other one was on top of it, sort of like in a triumphant fashion. Victor and defeated. The victorious magpie was the only one "talking", appearing to be giving a speech, while the rest were listening. What it was proclaiming, it's anyone's guess. Never seen anything more glorious with my own eyes.
- jamesfmilne 6y agoI think corvids are known to mourn their dead, and hold funerals. Perhaps it was a eulogy? https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/10/151003-animals-science-crows-birds-culture-brains/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/10/151003-anima...
- ficklepickle 6y agoI saw a crow funeral once. It was so fascinating. I saw the old crow, clearly not well, then 30 mins later he had passed and there were crows all around. Another 30 mins and they had all left again (except the dead one obvs). I'm really fortunate to live directly under their flight path to a massive roosting site in east Vancouver. Every day at dusk, there is a crow highway in the sky. They are fascinating creatures.
- m463 6y ago> Every day at dusk, there is a crow highway in the sky. I've seen that, big flocks of crows flying somewhere every evening. Where do they go? More than once I've wanted to follow them.
- glenneroo 6y agoI used to live near the flight path of crows retreating by dusk. For years, in warmer months, hundreds would gather daily at sunset at the local kiddie pool / nature park and have communal bath parties and squawk in the huge trees until the sun set, then fly off again.
- kleton 6y agoPeople have been using monkeys to harvest coconuts for a while, but Westerners just found out about that and there was a big outcry and boycotts. Meanwhile people employ dogs to chase ruminants around or train corvids to pick up litter.
- JNRowe 6y agoAnd birds to gather fish¹. Can't seem to find a good video of the cormorants in action, but the article is quite good. ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormorant_fishing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormorant_fishing
- nojokes 6y agoI am wondering how they found out how it works. We have many magpies living near our house I we would like to interact with them.
- coldcode 6y agoThat last one did not care for peanuts. You could tell its body language was like, wtf, more peanuts, this thing is broken.
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- noncoml 6y agoPeanuts again? But we had peanuts yesterday!
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoI've imagined a brave new world where special animals clean up litter, delivering it to a bin for kibble. "Remember to scatter your napkins children! We wouldn't want the squirrels to starve!"
- jessriedel 6y agoHonestly if you could make the training procedure fast and efficient (perhaps even automating that part?), this seems like a very economical litter clean-up technique. Just stick a machine out doors with a solar panel on the top, and come by once a month to empty the bin and refill the food. You'd need to make sure the exchange rate (food per trash) is set based on the weight of the trash in order to avoid incentivizing the birds from tearing trash into smaller pieces for more food. And you might need some decent machine vision to reject non trash. Seems eminently solveable though.
- fakedang 6y agoAn example of overengineering things. Animals (specifically corvids) don't measure things by weight and determine an exchange rate, they just look at them with a 1:1 ratio and check for similarity. In this particular set up, they would simply correlate food with particular types of trash that they have been trained with and dump only those kinds of trash into the apparatus. To them, tearing up the trash would be more effort than finding new trash.
- yorak 6y agoYes, rather than exchange rate, I'd be more worried about corvids carrying trash from the landfill to exchange it to food. Or, in case of cigarette stubs, emptying well contained ashtrays to the tables and floors only to get to those valuable stubs.
- fakedang 6y agoThis is more likely actually. Corvids tend to lean towards gaming the system in other ways, like breaking into the trash store and re-dumping the trash repeatedly (like the Indians did with snakes during the British Raj and the Vietnamese did with rats during French rule).
- mrtweetyhack 6y agoI would like to see this opensourced hardware
- noneeeed 6y agoIf we're talking magpies, then I have to drop a link to this wonderfully eerie setting of the old magpie rhyme ("one for sorrow, two for joy... etc") by the Unthank sisters https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fPbWEa1cyg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fPbWEa1cyg
- mensetmanusman 6y agoPeople also trained a ferret to clean a particle accelerator: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-particle-accelerator-fermilab https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-particl...
- macintux 6y agoThat’s a great story, thanks. They also ran TV cables for Princess Diana’s wedding. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/582123.stm
- KineticLensman 6y agoI visited a stately home in the UK once. One 19C owner had been an early adopter of electricity, and had used ferrets to help lay the cabling rather than rip up the impressive wooden flooring.
- js2 6y agoHere's the video where he explains how he trained them: https://youtu.be/zvmhl-E4QQ0 https://youtu.be/zvmhl-E4QQ0 But basically, he covered the surface with bottle caps and a slot they birds could knock the caps into and it would feed them. They'd knock the caps in accidentally, and get food. He learned in an earlier experiment where they had to press a button to get food that the button had to be relatively close to the food. There was an even earlier step where he just fed them randomly to get them interested in the feeder in the first place. They're very trainable animals. Smarter than my dog it seems. They're much more willing to experiment and seem to learn very quickly. Training my current dog requires tons of patience. He experiments very little while alternately repeating a behavior I'm trying to extinguish. I have to work with him in extremely small steps. Very sweet, but oh so hard to train.
- csomar 6y agoMagpies are definitively more cognitively able than the smartest dogs. They can recognize themselves and they have sophisticated relations.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jacobush 6y agoNot disagreeing with you regarding dogs, you could have been describing mine. But I also find that when they really want something, they are more cunning and improvising. More than once have I got the feeling he just waits for me to leave so he can start with whatever shenanigans he's up to.
- mekoka 6y agoNext: Magpies develop "capsitalism". I'm sorry, it was right there.
- csomar 6y agoTheft seems to be such a problem in the Magpie bottle cap gig that the Magpies are so fast to claim their lot. They seem to be aware that other birds can snatch their hard-work. It's only a matter of time before they implement a tax system to finance a police operation.
- elwell 6y agoJoshua Klein did something like this over ten years ago with crows. One of my favorite og TED talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mm1H5DYdlk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mm1H5DYdlk
- protomyth 6y agoAt some point corvids are going to learn that humans deliver food via drones, and the race will be on. I pretty sure they will figure out what color of drone the local grocery store is using.
- fy20 6y agoI regularly see crows going through bins in a park near me. They ignore everything except the brown paper bags with red and yellow markings on them.
- jachee 6y agoI once watched a group of three ravens work together to raid a McDonald's trash bin. Two would push in the (admittedly very weak-sprinted) door, while the third would hop in and out, dropping fries on the ground, they all took turns at each role and had a veritable feast.
- mschuster91 6y agoIn Munich, the city government is replacing trash bins in "crow hotspots" with supposedly crow-safer variants. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/neue-muelleimer-stadt-kauft-kraehensichere-muelleimer-1.3847787 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/neue-muelleimer-stadt-k...
- ZainRiz 6y agoThis reminds me of the guy who built a vending machine for crows, and trained wild crows to actually deposit money to buy peanuts. He gave a TED talk about it back in 2008: https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_a_thought_experiment_on_the_intelligence_of_crows https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_a_thought_experiment_...
- quickthrower2 6y agoWhen the feeder is broken or gets forgotten you are going to be left with a cargo cult.
- grp000 6y agoSee, that's where it gets interesting. We can then move on to the next stage of the experiment where we give the crows hands, allowing them to fix the machine themselves.
- amingilani 6y agoThis reminds of this[0] bird feeder that dispenses peanuts for coins. Crows would use it. [0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2982961/The-feeder-trains-birds-PAY-food-Crow-Box-teaches-corvids-collect-coins-return-peanuts.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2982961/The-...
- naringas 6y agosoembody should try this with cigarrete butts
- miked85 6y agoIt literally mentions that in the article.
- tomcooks 6y agoWhy not link the original article instead of this spamfest? https://www.hackster.io/hfor62/training-wild-birds-to-trade-litter-for-food-8f9a55 https://www.hackster.io/hfor62/training-wild-birds-to-trade-...
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y agoseed economy :) I find this so amazing. Thinking what else cigarette butts, small plastic... How does system differentiate that birds does not cheat bringing all kind of small parts, woodchips, branches and similar ?
- jschulenklopper 6y agoRelated story, about dolphins doing a similar trick... and gaming the system: > Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.sci...
- INTPenis 6y agoI've seen this before with crows, squirrels, cigarette butts for example. But my thought is always; how do I prevent one hundred pigeons from descending on this feeder? Because that's all I see in the city where I live, pigeons, pigeons, and more pigeons. Sure there are corvids too, seagulls of course near the sea, but if any food is outside pigeons will flock to this spot. I guess magpies are one of the few birds that can figure out how to get the actual food so the others won't bother. But I assume there's a training stage where you actually have to teach the magpies about the food by leaving some out for them.
- 542354234235 6y ago> But I assume there's a training stage where you actually have to teach the magpies about the food by leaving some out for them. Corvids can be trained by "showing" them how it works and they can teach other birds how to use it. So you may not need to "leave out" food for just any bird but wait for crow or other corvid, show them how to use it, and then let them spread the word.
- yasinaydin 6y agoAn interesting idea for generating Caps in the next Fallout game.