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One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed
by JohnMakin 4mo ago
One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something.
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.
- fritzo 4mo agoBy "sizable rock" do you mean large pebble or small boulder?
- JohnMakin 4mo agoA little larger than a golf ball.
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago[dead]
- IAmBroom 4mo agoSomething that produces a loud exclamation in a movie character, but possible permanent brain damage IRL.
- JohnMakin 4mo agoYea, what creeped me out, is this must have been done before, and got whatever effect the bird intended. hard to say what it’s motives were of course but they’re smart enough to know what they are doing
- markdown 4mo agoWhere I am from, a rock is by definition huge. It sounds like the bird dropped a stone.
- doodlebugging 4mo agoIf the stone the crow dropped weighed a stone, that's a big fuckin' rock where I come from.
- markdown 4mo agoNot to mention a big fuckin' bird.
- lowestprimate 4mo agoA large pebble the size of a small pebble
- UncleOxidant 4mo agoThey're even apparently able to pass their grudges along to other crows who did not have first-hand experience with the subject of the grudge.
- consumer451 4mo agoHere is that paper. It's amazing. https://www.aaas.org/membership/member-spotlight/scientist-john-marzluff-knows-fears-crow https://www.aaas.org/membership/member-spotlight/scientist-j...
- cortesoft 4mo agoMy understanding is crows can recognize individuals, so I would think back to what you did to piss off that crow, or that crow's friends.
- bitwize 4mo agoAs demonstrated in humans, the ability to recognize individuals is little impediment to resentment based on group membership.
- JohnMakin 4mo agoI was guessing just a general preference towards anyone in their area. I have certainly never done anything harmful towards them.
- shimman 4mo agoCrows have been known to harass distinct individuals over others, even going as far as to teach other crows about this person. I wonder if this was an elder crow whose eyesight has decreased with age and gave out the wrong descriptions to their friends. :D
- prerok 4mo agoI remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least crows, which the article was focusing on). 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.
- bruckie 4mo agoI wonder what the energy/evolutionary cost of densely-connected brains is. If it's advantageous, why are crows exceptional?
- xeonmc 4mo agoMaybe they require the equivalent of advanced EUV machines to make?
- IAmBroom 4mo agoIt could simply be an evolutionary "discovery", with no particular advantage over our "brain model". Evolution doesn't seek out optima; it simply encourages genetic structures that improve odds of reproductive success. 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.
- virgildotcodes 4mo agoIn terms of why bird brains would be exceptionally efficient for their volume (and I assume by extension, mass), would be that weight is at a premium for them.
- CSMastermind 4mo agoI'm not an expert in the area but have read a bunch on this topic to try and understand it better. Bird brains and human brains are structured very differently. Birds are much more like GPUs with independent distributed processing happening in parallel. Mammals have these big bidirectional layers where signals are constantly propagating up and down in a big connected computation.
- helterskelter 4mo agoCrows in country will wait for a newborn deer to be left alone in a field by their mothers shortly after birth to peck the baby's eyes out so it dies and the crow can eat it later. My neighbor had told me about this happening, and maybe a month later I saw a fawn with its eyes pecked out shortly after it had died. The doe just sat at the edge of the field by it all night. So sad, but really smart of the crows. Crows have also been known to alert predators like wolves to easy prey so they can pick the remains.
- ifwinterco 4mo agoThey also do this to lambs, they're smart but evil
- kibwen 4mo ago> smart but evil Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.
- jamiek88 4mo agoI glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment. 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.
- jancsika 4mo ago> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? 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.
- 4mo ago
- phendrenad2 4mo agoOh, crows are WAY smarter than that. If one tried to drop a stone on you, it was because it didn't like your online comments.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoI've seen crows pick up walnuts and drop them in front of moving cars so the tires will open them. I had heard that they will do that, but it was still something to see it happen.
- observationist 4mo agoThey plan pretty deeply - if you think about things like plastic lid snowboarding, or cup sorting games (fit the smaller cups inside the larger) and those types of puzzles, there's usually an abstract reward, whether it's fun, play, revenge, or some future food or whatnot. They tease other animals, will play fetch, demonstrate a rich emotional inner life, and all of those things can be motivations for their complex plans. Throw in familial loyalty, social dynamics, interactions with humans, and it's a recipe for glorious chaos. There's a lot more going on that doesn't cleanly map to most people's conception of birds. Ravens are wonderful creatures.
- braggerxyz 4mo ago> ... glorious chaos. I like that concept. Thanks for the laugh! :D
- billiam 4mo agoMaybe you should be asking yourself what you did to piss of this corvid? They have been shown to recognize faces.
- e40 4mo agoI was talking with a neighbor once, and we had just started feeding the local crows. We were standing there for about 39 minutes, the I heard something metallic hit the sidewalk. I looked about 4 ft away, directly under the power lines, at a bottle cap. I hadn’t seen one of those in decades. Clearly it had been dropped by the crow perched up there. 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!
- nativeit 4mo agoI’ve nothing empirical to back this up, but it’s my understanding that shiny objects like bottle caps are prized toys, and the sort of thing one might be gifted by corvids who have taken a liking to you. I have heard plenty of anecdotal evidence that crows will exchange gifts with one another, and with humans, to develop and nurture positive relationships. 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.