Clever Crows

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

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Winner, best book!

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It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

I'm Hannah Fry.

And I'm Dara O'Brien.

And this is Curious Cases.

The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

With the power of science.

I mean, do we always solve them?

I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

But it's with science.

I'm very excited about today's Curious Cases, Dara.

Well, obviously, we're equally excited about all Curious Cases, Hannah.

But some more equally than others.

And this one?

And this one is the day that I get to realise my lifetime ambition of befriending a crow.

Ooh, that's not where I expected that sentence to end.

No.

Befriending a crow.

Do you know how cool crows are?

Crows for me are the establishing shot in a horror movie where, you know, oh look, there's a crow.

Somebody's going to get horribly impaled.

That's what a crow is to me.

Yeah.

I mean, I think crows have got a bad rep.

I think they've been unfairly represented as two-dimensional characters on screen.

Oh, there's more to them than that.

Such as?

Such as?

I mean,

Dora, the collective noun for them is a murder.

What more?

What's information do you see?

If we're writing a column of pros and cons, and I'm on con, the murder thing is surely on my side rather than yours, right?

Are they very smart?

Super smart.

So So there is all kinds of crow behavior that has been written about, that's been observed.

It's actually quite difficult to study scientifically.

One of them is a crow court, right?

Where you get a naughty crow who's like stolen a bit of food, maybe been a bit of a jerk to other crows, and all the crows will form a great circle around them, and a senior crow in the middle will sort of squawk at them for a bit.

And then after a while, the crows will step in as if to punish the offending crow and peck at them until they've learnt their lesson.

I mean, I'll also admit that is quite on the evil spectrum there.

Again, but you want to befriend them?

Oh, yeah.

Or have you attempted to befriend them?

Both.

So I live near this very big open heath, and on more than one occasion, I've gone out and

tried to befriend them.

I find that it depends on how much food I'm carrying.

Yeah.

That is always the thing about animals.

We kid ourselves that these animals in our lives are devoted to us.

Oh, I stop giving them food.

They're not devoted anymore.

So you've gone out a number of times and would be great as you can.

I think that crows have this emotional depth and complexity to them that you are just not seeing and it is my job over the next few minutes to convince you of that.

But not just my job because we also actually have had a question in that is very central to this.

Have a listen.

Hi, I'm Eleanor and I am wondering just quite how clever crows are.

The crows who live near me watch people throwing things into bins.

And then they'll stand on the edge of the bin and sort of examine it.

And if they feel like it, they'll pull it out, eat whatever is left, play with the container for a little bit, and then leave it near the bins.

And when I tried to give one a strawberry, it clearly didn't like it very much.

But it ate it anyway, because I had deliberately thrown it to the crow.

These creatures are so smart that are crows capable of very complex emotions such as behaving politely towards people

okay so look the issue is whether they have some sort of human like emotion intelligence um or whether we're kidding ourselves slightly here whether we're over anthropomorphizing these animals

and we've got some actual experts and a crow to ask about this and a crow and a crow

we are joined by nikki clayton professor of comparative cognition at the university of Cambridge, and Professor Andreas Nieder, a neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, who studies crows' brains.

We're also joined by professional bird trainer Lloyd Book.

And Lloyd, you have brought our most special guest, which respect to all of you.

Who is this?

This is Bren.

He's a raven and he's 14 years old now.

And I've had Bren since he was two weeks old.

As far as he's concerned, I'm his mate for life.

Initial impressions, he's larger than I expected.

A raven rather than a crow.

They're in the same Corvid family, but obviously ravens are their own

species, yes.

And he's bobbing around a lot in a very curious way.

He's within a cage at the moment.

He will be looking for opportunities for food, usually, but not always food, but like there's Nikki's handbag over there.

So

that will be an attraction because he knows bags mean food, you see.

You've described them, Nicola, as feathered apes.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, can you explain what that means?

Well, when it comes to their cognitive abilities, their intelligence, if you like, they're as clever as the great apes.

And that's why we call them them feathered apes.

But they're smaller, smaller brains.

Smaller brains and smaller bodies.

Yes.

But if you look at their brains relative to their body size, their brains are as big as those of chimpanzees and the other great apes.

And if we think of the kind of the traditional tests for this, tool making, social skills, ravens or corvids generally will pass all of these tests, will they?

That's right.

They're very good at tool use.

And in fact, the really famous tool tool users amongst the Corvids are the new Caledonian crows and the Hawaiian crows that use tools a lot in the wild.

In captivity though or just in an opportunistic setting the other corvids that don't use tools in the wild will do so.

So they don't need tools to get the food they want

but if you give them a problem task that needs a tool to solve it they will spontaneously

what sort of things we mean i i mean they'll use sticks stones markers of word but they they will also improvise so there was one time when one of our experimenters in my corvid palettes was a bit slow off the mark to pass said stick and the bird just stole a pencil off his ear and used the pencil instead and on tests that had been done literally comparing the corvids the crows and children they passed tests that children don't pass till they're eight years of age that's damning in many ways.

I thought that might surprise me.

I should have brought in my seven-year-old.

Yeah.

And we should have done a direct competition.

Yeah, are you smarter than a crow?

That's the TV format.

Are you feeling a bit nervous though?

I mean, the ominous figure is now in the room.

Yeah, the harbinger of doom is there.

But actually, to be honest, it's more like watching

a dog

its environment, like whatever.

He's bobbing up and down and having a look at things.

And, you know, is their eyesight good enough to get a sense of the place?

Oh, yeah, they've got very good vision.

Their vision's better than ours.

Yeah.

Could they recognise red hair?

Oh, yeah.

In fact, there have been studies showing that crows, I'm using interchangeably using the word crow and Corvid to really refer to all the crow species, including ravens and jays and rooks and magpies.

But they're very good at recognising individual faces of human beings.

Right, I need to have a word with my local crows.

Yeah, they really don't put the word effort in here.

The thing is, though, they do have this sort of bad press, right?

They do have this mythology around them.

Why is that?

Well, they have two kinds of mythology around them, don't they?

They have the bad press of being the harbingers of doom and gloom and being somehow evil, probably because they're black.

But there's also many folklore stories as well as scientific evidence of just how smart they are.

In fact, the Essex fable task that is one where the thirsty crow puts stones in the water to raise the water level so she can drink.

That was the experiment that we we actually did with our birds and compared children.

We didn't make them thirsty, we just floated a treat on the top.

For the crows it was a beautiful, delicious worm.

And for the young children it was a little sticker that could be exchanged for another big sticker that said University of Cambridge I'm as clever as a crow.

And the children they weren't though.

And it just took the kids a long time to figure it out.

It was basically understanding the the principles in its most complex form of displacement.

So the Archimedes principle, you know, you have to put heavy objects in to displace the water.

If you put very light ones, then they'll just float and raise the water level and therefore you won't get the worm or the sticker, depending on whether you like worms or stickers.

And the Jays were really good at passing this test.

And the poor old children, it took them till they were eight years of age to be able to spontaneously do it.

And four and five-year-olds were useless.

I was really surprised.

I mean, kids have experience of soap that floats in baths.

Baths and

floats.

As a matter of interest, when the results were coming through and you could see the crow was doing better than the children, were you delighted because you study crows or disappointed because you are a human?

Perplexed as to why the children were so bad.

Beyond that, do we have a sense that the crows have a theory of mind?

How would you describe a theory of mind firstly?

So a theory of mind refers to the ability to think about about what other people are thinking and how their thoughts might be different to yours.

And the Corvids are masters of this.

So, the thing they do for a living is they hide food.

We call it caching.

But they're really good at watching where others have hidden their food and stealing those caches, and also watching where the others who might steal their caches are looking in order to protect their caches.

So, it's kind of like this competition, you know, and being a bit careful.

hmm, will he know where I've hidden something?

Both of you can see me now, maybe I need to distract you and move it somewhere else.

And they can keep track of all those all those things.

And we know that it's not just a hard-wired behaviour that it's learned.

So

experienced birds who've had lots of experience of caching and stealing other birds' caches,

if they're watched, when the other birds leave, they move it to a new hiding place.

But naive birds who haven't had experience of stealing food don't do that.

So in short, it takes a thief to know one.

Talking of thieving,

we have thieved a stone from Bran and hidden it somewhere in this room, Lloyd.

Yes, he's a stone.

Don't ask me why.

You like that stone.

I want to see him try and go and get the stone.

Well, do you want to take him out when we're leaving?

Yeah, okay.

Let's do it.

Oh, no.

Oh, well, I'll be.

And look,

hops up onto your arm.

And look what he's gone to.

Straight to his stone.

Straight to his stone.

And there's a tree under the stone there.

And this is not.

Because it's not a sense of smell that's guiding him.

No, they've got a poor sense of smell.

Brent, you're going to come and.

Can you talk to him?

Like, does he understand yourself?

Oh, he's looking down there.

Can you say because he's going to be there?

He'd look down a tube.

There's a roll of tubes at the end.

So he's just exploring.

He's just exploring his environment, which is as compelling as it is

if you release a kitten into the room or a puppy or any other animal.

Does anybody want to have him on their arm?

You are spiky, aren't you?

Well this

has gone very many.

This is a moment.

So you're wearing a leather glove at the moment Hannah with bits of meat on it and

that is a very handsome bird.

Yeah.

Yeah go on with him.

Left hand and left hand?

Yeah.

Oh my god that's astonishing.

Isn't it beautiful?

Does he have different calls that he uses as well?

Yeah and one of our little morning routines is he'll call three times times and I have to go

back to him and he'll call back to me.

Can I ask you about his emotional intelligence then?

Do you think that he does have a level of it?

Yeah I personally believe that.

I mean he can be in a good mood.

He can also be in a bad mood or he could just be a bit quiet or sometimes he's really excitable and lively.

Obviously I don't think it's anything like a human potentially but it's in its own way, in his raven way I do believe he is, I'm sure of it.

And can he sense your mood too?

Yeah very much so.

He can be quite attentive.

He's a very gentle raven.

He's a very, I will describe him as an affectionate raven.

He'll want to hold my finger and then I have to put my eye up against his or tiggle around his eye.

And that's a real, like, weird...

We trust in each other totally.

And I've never robbed him of his cash.

So when we go out flying, yeah, he cashes in front of me because he knows he can trust me.

And I've never taken from him.

Has he ever taken from you?

Oh, yeah, no, he will do that.

I mean, he knows how to undo that zip on the pouch and raid all the food.

We did one experiment with cups and it was a magic effect where the items are moved around and the jays had to follow where the food was hidden.

And in one of them, they were expecting a boring old peanut in the cup and they got a delicious worm and they were very happy about that.

The crest comes up and they go for the worm and then they're preen you and all happy as Larry.

But if you do it the other way around they're expecting a delicious worm or a piece of cheese and they find a boring old peanut.

Oof, they went for the cameraman's glasses, flew off with them, gave him a good jab and then just chucked the cups across the ovary.

So that's like cross and revenge.

These are emotions that I don't think my dog is capable of having.

Is there a danger of anthropomorphising?

Well I don't think with these because they were experiments but of course whenever you have any kind of individual you're very affectionate with, you're bound to spot all the things you think are clever and ignore the things that aren't so clever.

I mean, most parents do that with their children, too.

Without anthropomorphise our own children.

In terms of the way in which they experience emotion, they'll bond, of course, won't they?

Andres Merris?

Yes, that's certainly right, that they can bond, yes.

So there may be different mechanisms that allow birds to bond to humans, for instance.

There's this phenomenon called cilial imprinting, which is a form of programmed learning that has been found in many birds that leads to a very strong and irreversible attachment of a bird chick to any object that is moving, and this object can even be a human that is around.

So this could be one reason why these birds that are hand-raised are very attached to humans.

But I think one of the things that's interesting with my hand-raised birds in my COVID palace is that they also form strong attachments with new PhD students coming into the lab.

It's not just me who hand-raised them.

In terms of enjoying the company of people who treat them well I noticed you said that you put them in a palace which sort of I think really defines how much you're worshipping these creatures.

Yeah well they're very large avaries, 30 metre long avories.

I've got four of them.

The palace can help me

protect my birds.

And do they repay that affection in any way?

Well I've been given gifts.

Okay such as I've had a wine cork, I've had a screw top, I've had a walnut, I've had a marble and I've had one of those tops off a beer bottle.

I'm glad you mentioned gift giving.

I want to pay you a clip from someone who has first-hand experience as well.

Gabby Mann started feeding the crows in Seattle where she lived when she was six years old and this is what happened to her.

I came from the bus stop and there was on like the porch area there was like this ring with a stone and

I showed it to my mom and she didn't believe me when I said it was given by the crows.

My favorites though, there's this pendant that I have that has best on it and I always used to say that I think that they'd had the other end of the friend pendant so like best friend.

My mom dropped her lens cap while taking photos in her backyard.

She was looking for it and couldn't find it and the crows came back with the lens cap in their mouth but had come back and had put it into a bird bath.

I think that it's cool that a crow could recognize that my mom was probably looking for something and being able to pick it up and go out of its way to like grab it and kind of in a way clean it.

It's just little things like that that the crows did that showed my family and I like how sweet they are giving that lens cap.

It was just an act of kindness that they just did for us.

It's interesting because I have had cats for years.

They will give gifts of dead mice, stuff you do not want.

COVID seems to be a level above that of actually thinking about their audience, as it were, when it comes to the gift, like whatever they do.

I think we're back to theory of mind, don't we?

Yeah, but there's an element of that like there.

Does Bran give you gifts, Lloyd?

No, that's something he's not generally doing.

Interestingly, listening to that, with the lens cap, I think I might have a behavioural reason why that might have happened.

Obviously, the crows wouldn't understand what a plastic lens cap is, but if you give a Corvid something that's hard that they could eat, they will go to water and they'll put it into soak it.

So it could be they picked the lens cap up and thought, I wonder if we can eat this or not.

Wasn't an act of kindness at all.

It wasn't cleaning the mum's lens cap, I was just trying to eat it.

Could you game this though to your advantage?

Could you like train crows to go and do litter picking?

It's been done.

Yes.

So the story started in the UK at the M4 Mowbray service station.

The rooks actually, so another form of crow closely related to the ravens, would stand on the edge of the bin in tandem and then use the bin liner as a tool to pull up the bin liner until it was flat on both sides.

If you only do it from one side, the food goes to the other side where you can't reach.

But if you do it in tandem, then it comes up and then one would start tossing the food over the side.

side and then after a while the other one would fly down and protect the food so it wasn't being stolen by I think it was a pied wagtail in the original footage this was on a programme called Britain's Cleverest Animal and the rooks won the prize and then I got a phone call they said oh there's a problem now from the people at the service station because these rooks are making so much mess because they're eating the food and then all the other rubbish they're just tossing around.

Is there any way you could train them to clear up after themselves so a team in Paris actually trained their rooks to put the litter back in and that part of Paris looks beautifully litter free Eleanor our questioner she asked about rudeness so would they like stop giving you gifts if you insulted them in some way I suspect so I mean whether you would call it rudeness per se I don't know but I think if you were to steal their caches or exchange them for something they don't want they certainly give you the equivalent of I am displeased and something they don't do when you give them nice things.

So they certainly react to positive and negative behaviour.

Whether there are other kind of behavioural differences when you're being positive versus when you're being negative that they're responding to rather than rudeness is an open question, of course.

Because generally, you know, if you're being kind to them, you're going to be quiet and you're going to be gentle and your movements are going to be soft and carefully controlled.

And if you're being aggressive and horrible you're probably making a lot more noise and movements that frighten them.

So there could be lots of reasons why they react differently.

Maybe that's the mistake I've been making on the Heath all this time is giving them food but in a really obnoxious way.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We the man to be home!

Winner best score!

We the man to be seen!

Winner best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Andreas, but we've been talking here about the behaviours of the birds, which are all, of course, very impressive.

But I know that you have done work trying to understand the actual brain mechanisms that are underpinning those behaviors.

So how similar are crows' brains to human brains?

Is it sort of the same structure just in a different animal?

You have to imagine that we are only very remotely related to these crows.

The last common ancestor lived about 320 million years ago.

And since these 320 million years, birds and mammals, including ourselves, evolved very differently.

And the consequences is that one part of the brain, the one that we cherish most, because it's making us smart, the end brain, is made up very differently, anatomically differently in birds, including corvids.

So that's what we try to understand, how their brains is also giving rise to these very similar functions that we also cherish very much in primates, for instance.

Well, then how on earth do you manage to do that comparison?

Because I mean, okay, we know quite a bit about the different areas of the human brain, you know, things like planning, things like, you know, emotional regulation, all of that kind of stuff.

How on earth do you go about trying to find those areas in Corvids when their brains are so structurally different?

I think it would start with neuroanatomy.

So you would need to find an area that receives information from all senses, the eyes, the ears, what have you, and is then also projecting out via its neurons to motor structures in order to allow this animal to act on what it is perceiving.

And these areas are, of course, existing in a bird brain.

One of the structures that is very interesting to us is the so-called nidopalium caudolateral.

It's a very difficult name.

That is supposed to be the bird equivalent of the prefrontal cortex in our brain.

And the prefrontal cortex is the structure that is making us human, basically, if you like.

But funny enough, it's not at the front of the head, but at the back of the head in the bird brains.

So it seems that evolution came up with the same principles of processing this information, just with a very different design of the brain.

Evolution is kind of crazy, isn't it?

To have independently evolved similar mechanisms but with different physical structures.

Well introvergently because I mean there are many ways in which the problems that they're solving are similar to the problems solved by other primates.

I mean we are the only species we know of on this planet that can read and write.

No other animal that we know of can.

But at another level when we're talking about the social skills and the physical skills, the problems are actually very similar.

Like us they're trying to keep track of what others are thinking and who

can see the same things as them and who can't.

Like us, they're keeping track of time, of the past, the present and the future in order to be able to, for example, use their memories of the past to anticipate, imagine and importantly plan for the future.

The problem solving that Brown was so beautifully demonstrating, the tool use, they're all the same, the same sorts of problems.

So the argument is that although the brains and neuroarchitecturally very different, as Andrea said, actually, the problems that they're trying to solve may be quite similar.

In terms of their intelligence, though, I can see how the social aspects would give rise to this sort of behaviour.

But they're also, I mean, they kind of eat everything, right?

They're very motivated by food.

How much of that is important to their evolution?

Well, what we've argued is that the tool use allows them to get food that they wouldn't otherwise be able to.

Do they like eating everything?

Well, they still have their favourites.

They're fussy.

And in fact, we've got one group of rooks that are vegetarian, and the other group just really love meat.

Their choice.

I mean, they give them the same food.

Any vegans among them?

There aren't any vegans.

No, they do.

I have yet to meet a COVID that does not like the odd wax worm or teeth.

But I do think that time is important and this whole idea that they can keep track of when things ripen and when things perish and they can keep track of that in the mind's eye without seeing it that is pretty impressive and of course I think theory of mind is related to that because the time thing is understanding that I'm here in the present but I was somewhere else in the past and I'll be somewhere else in the future and that keeping track of other times is a similar thing I think to keeping track of other minds.

Does this kind of advance our understanding about consciousness then, that it can appear in different ways other than just the human way?

Yes, I think it does.

It suggests that these things evolved independently in these very distantly related animals.

And in the case of the crows or corvids and the great apes, the selection pressures may be very similar or at least have a number of striking parallels.

But if you look at some other animals that are extremely intelligent and yet even more distantly related to us, the cuttles and the octopus, they seem to have completely different selection pressures.

They're not long-lived.

Most of them are not highly social.

Predation is a big thing and their thing, for crows it might be catching, but if you're a cephalopod, an octopus, your big thing is dynamic camouflage.

So you're not hiding food, you're hiding yourself.

I also would say that...

corbids have a certain basic sensory consciousness and we also could find neurons in the brain that are signaling when the birds are aware of certain visual stimulus as opposed to when they are not aware of it even if the stimulus has the same intensity from a physical point of view so it's widening the idea of cognition or consciousness because it indicates that on different branches on the tree of life or the tree of animal life

there could be situations where such structures, the brain I mean, is developing in such a way that subjective experiences can become possible.

We may not be the only species on this planet that has some level of consciousness.

It's very, very interesting what you're saying, and Bran is an excellent advocate.

But there is just

a tiny voice in my head going, if they're that smart, how come scarecrows still work?

It does feel a couple of sticks with a coat on them is enough for all the talk about how intelligent they are and what they can do.

You put two sticks at a cross formation, stick a coat and a hat in it, and this guy will stay out of the field.

And that surely, surely settles the issue.

Oh, I'm not sure it really works with crows, it works with other animals.

Don't wise up quite quickly, really?

Yes, very quickly.

Then, maybe, maybe the smartest thing that crows has ever done is not letting on that they're scared by scare crows and then just carrying this eating the seed.

Oh, no, Mr.

Farmer, oh, this is so scary,

and then quietly going back and eating the feed.

It's pretty remarkable.

I'm now coming around to you on that.

It's been an absolute pleasure to have you in.

Professor Nikki Clayton, Professor Andres Nieder, Lloyd Buck, but more than any of you, Bran the Raven.

Thank you for coming in.

I think I have scratched my corporate itch.

There we go.

Fine.

Whereas I am already imagining what type of throne I'll build on which I will have my ravens gathered around me.

You can borrow my cake.

Oh, that'd be great.

That would be the finishing touch.

It's like, yeah, go ahead.

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Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We the man to be qualified.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.