This whole article is pretty interesting, but the last paragraph is worth quoting:
For instance, in 2008 Marzluff had researchers in caveman masks capture crows while others in a control mask—Dick Cheney—let the birds be. Afterward the birds ignored the harmless Cheneys but scolded and chased the cavemen, and did so for years.
Poor birds! Probably thought they could trust a Crow-Magnon.
Dick Cheney masks! Probably thought they could trust a Crow-Magnon. I have faith in the world again.
Seems like crows are prime for weaponization (maybe expressing my inner Dick Cheney here). Just don a mask and attack a few crows near your target, leaving some witnesses.
Has it ever been done before? A quick Google search didn't uncover anything.
If you find this interesting, you should really look into the intelligence of crows. They've been observed to remember human faces, wait on traffic lights, plan, and a whole bunch of things that are very impressive.
Theres a youtube clip of a crow solving a puzzle that little children struggle with - cant find it now as at work but dont think it would be hard to find for anyone interested
Corvids (crows, ravens, magpies, jackdaws) are pretty bright. Some of them also have quite a bit of voice control. Like parrots, they can speak human words if trained.
He does sound a little like a voice synthesiser, but I think that's mostly because both birds and computers speak English poorly. Here's another example: https://youtu.be/AfsnHVaScjg
I understand that Raven's can vocalize, I am just skeptical of that original video you linked. I am just wondering if there was evidence that it was authentic since that Youtube user's videos seem to go so far beyond what I've seen Raven's do before.
I think he sounds like a voice synthesizer because the owner probably "trained" the raven to say nevermore by letting a computer program repeat that word occasionally over long periods of time. Thus he learned to mimic the synthesizer sound, not a real human saying it. You can also hear the bird repeat some notification sounds a "waka waka" sound that sounds like Pacman.
Re: voice synth, I think that's just an artifact of how birds vocal chords (or whatever gizmo they've got in there) work. The timbre of the voice is going to be different than that of a primate.
EDIT: you can even hear it in their natural calls, they have a buzzing, saw-like texture in the upper-mid and high range.
Crows definitely have good voice control. A local nature preserve and wildlife rehab center here has a couple of captive American crows (they can't be returned to the wild because of injuries). They mimic human voices very well. One of frequently says "American crow".
I used to have a really awesome "symbiosis" with a flock of crows. For four years, while going to work, I passed every day down a desolate black road, near a walnut tree. At first, I'd grab the walnuts from the ground and crows'd get angry and even dive-bomb me. However, as time passed by, we started understanding each other - when they see me coming, they'd drop walnuts on the ground and wait for me to smash their shells open. As a reward for my effort, they won't mind me grabbing a few walnuts for myself.
Cycling to work one day and while stopped at some lights at a major Dublin intersection I noticed a crow drop a half eaten apple just ahead of the stop line.
Looking back after the lights turned green I could see the apple had been crushed by a car and the crow was gobbling up the delicious juicy apple mush.
>My dog has been on a killing spree this summer, sometimes catching 2 birds in a week :(.
usually dog tags on the collar is enough. Otherwise, have you ever thought about attaching a small bell to the collar so that it'd warn the birds before the dog catches them?
No, I didn't even think of that. I switched the sprinklers to run at midnight instead of 7-8PM a few days ago, and so far so good. If it happens again I'll give the collar w/ tags a try, thanks.
Hopefully she's learning that she gets a bath and I get grumpy every time it happens too.
Growing up, I had a cat who got attacked by a hawk. He came running in one day with deep talon scratches on his back.
My mom took him to the vet, who cleaned up the wounds and said that it was probably a juvenile who was overconfident in what he could grab. An adult wouldn't have tried.
The mental image of this teenager hawk swooping down, grabbing a fatass 15-pound cat, and struggling to pick it up while Mom looks down and shakes her head makes me smile.
I've seen an adult hawk predate a small dog before. The dog was likely killed by the impact of the hawk, though I couldn't be sure because the hawk carried the limp body away before the owner could take any action.
I heard some squawking in the yard, and went out to investigate. My cat had caught a young robin. There was a pair of robins, a pair of bluejays and a pair of crows all squawking, divebombing and generally harassing my cat. The robins and jays eventually went off somewhere else, but the crows carried on harrassing my cat for years. They would leave for the winter and come back the next year to make my cat's life miserable whenever they saw it. Over a dead bird of different species.
Mockingbirds also remember faces. They will attack if they think you are a predator. I had one who decided my daily walk was a threat - maybe I walked too close to its nest - and came straight at my face. Scary as hell. That bird then swooped to attack every time I went outdoors. To Kill a Mockingbird indeed.
I am not an ornithologist, but my first impression is that it isn't a "funeral". Birds do occasionally hit stuff and this seems more like a response to a possibly unconscious bird. Poke it, yell a bunch, maybe it'll come to. When the bird is actually dead the instinctive response is prolonged?
There is a young girl in Seattle who made friends with the local crows by feeding them, they soon were bringing her regular gifts in exchange for her snacks - http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
I tried to do the same thing in my backyard for about three weeks until one day my wife caught me putting little pieces of bread on our porch railing. She asked what I was doing and I explained making friends with the crows (what else?!). She asked me to stop so I did.
My only hope is that they attack her now and not me, with some level of understanding that she was the one who ruined all the fun...
Well, that's one interpretation, and the city and health department have made statements disagreeing with it. We'll see what the courts say eventually, it's scheduled to go to trial in August 2016. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Crow-feeding-Seattle-...
Not enough data to draw a firm conclusion from here, but I've heard enough stories of busybody neighbors to be suspicious of anyone who comes in claiming that bird poop has caused $200,000 worth of property damage. You'd expect the whole neighborhood to be leveled every time a starling migration comes through.
I'm not sure if it's ever happened in the Pacific Northwest, but bird poop can contaminate areas with a pathogen that persists in the soil and causes a tuberculosis-like lung disease. I think there was even a town in the Midwest that had to be abandoned because of it. Bird poop is also a vector for various parasites that can harm you and your pets. (Plus it's gross.)
Your hope may just come true. Crows are extremely intelligent and they live quite a long time. When I was a kid I went on a vacation with my family to a cabin by a lake. A man living in the neighborhood had a pet crow. The crow would get cosy around our dining table that was outside trying to grab some food, so my mother chased it away once. After that for the next 2 weeks we stayed there the crow would fly over every day and take a shit on my mother's laundry. There were 5 people in the family, but the crow would somehow always pick my mother's clothes. This is a true story.
I believe ravens and crows are very similar, this is a personal (long, and not the great) story about a raven I messed around with in Yosemite National Park:
When I was up on north dome (not to be confused with half dome) there was a group of raven's hanging out on the rocks watching us eat our late lunch. I had an apple core that I tossed to the side and watched as a raven warily tried to approach it. I walked over and grabbed the apple core before the raven could grab it so I could entertain myself teasing the raven for a bit before we started down the mountain. I started by putting my arm back ready to throw the apple and as I did that I noticed the raven kneel a bit as if getting ready to launch itself. I thought this was interesting as it showed it was anticipating me throwing the object based on my arm motion. As I relaxed my arm the bird also relaxed.
I tried grabbing a rock and again watched it brace itself to launch from the rock then tried switching the apple core and the rock behind my back and tossing the rock hoping the bird would dart after it thinking it was the core. The bird didn't do as I expected and instead just watched me carefully never motioning for the rocks.
I tore a piece of the apple from the core behind my back and tossed it just as I had with the rocks and before the piece of apple even left my hand the raven leaped from the rock in its direction.
This blew my mind. Not sure how the raven knew it was a chunk of apple and not a rock.
I messed around with that particular raven for a good 10-15 minutes tossing various things in its direction, testing its reactions and trying to mess with its little raven mind. All I managed to do however was be impressed at its level of experience in dealing with Yosemite tourists such as myself.
What most people don't realize is that most live forms lower on the chain can read our minds. So if the crow's reaction was different based on what you wanted to throw, it's because it knew what you wanted to do before you did it.
It was reading your thoughts.
Dogs and cats do it too.
A few years ago I went to a farm to buy a goat. The younger goats did not know why I was there, but when an older goat saw me and our eyes met, it knew, and took off.
But we have domesticated dogs for a long time, and some might argue that they are a lot better and quicker to pick up on our body language, than we are at picking up on theirs.
Dog Behaviorists spend a lot of their not training dogs, but training dog owners to understand and read their dog.
Sorry, no citation. Just my personal knowledge and experience.
And it's not just reading body language, but actual reading your thoughts. In the case of the crow, what body language tells it that the guy is about to throw a piece of rock or a bone when it can't SEE the object?
I know it's not something I can prove to you, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
Smaller animals are incredibly faster than humans in reaction times because of the difference in the length of their nerves. Birds are also far smarter than people give them credit for. Nothing can read minds tho. That's pure fantasy.
I'm just curious what your thought process is. I mean, what makes you think something so wacky as reading minds is happening (come on..) when the explanation is probably just that the birds have quick reflexes.
>what body language tells it that the guy is about to throw a piece of rock or a bone when it can't SEE the object?
Tons of things, from being able to understand body cues that the guy is up to some BS (like we can tell a liar), to smelling the thing he has in his hands...
Plus who said it "couldn't see the thing" in the first place? Even if it couldn't see what in his hand, it could have watched his moves before, as he left the apple and picked up the rock etc.
>A few years ago I went to a farm to buy a goat. The younger goats did not know why I was there, but when an older goat saw me and our eyes met, it knew, and took off.
It could have took off for 100000 reasons, non of which end being "because it read your mind".
For example: it got scared, it did it randomly, is afraid of strangers because it had some bad experience, etc...
The most "advanced" behaviour I'd attribute that to would be possibly having recognised that when strangers come, other goats disappear and don't come back.
But I'd expect it to be more likely to just be one of your simpler suggestions.
It's just bizarre to attribute it to mind reading, when we'd apply far more mundane reasons if we saw the same behaviour in people.
Don't downvote, it's true. Animals can read your thoughts. The mechanism seems to be that they can see your visualizations: I can call my sister's cat in from outside "telepathically" by clearly "seeing" in my mind's eye the cat walking in the back door and "sending" the imagery to him.
Sometimes the if the back door is closed and I'm not distracted by computer or something he "calls" me to open the door. Subjectively, I get this subtle "ping" that feels like "I should open the door for the cat" so I do and he's there waiting.
This sort of thing is pretty easy to develop. It's innate, you're already doing it, you just have to learn to pay attention and calibrate.
>Don't downvote, it's true. Animals can read your thoughts. The mechanism seems to be that they can see your visualizations: I can call my sister's cat in from outside "telepathically" by clearly "seeing" in my mind's eye the cat walking in the back door and "sending" the imagery to him.
Unsubstantiated nonsense. Your perception that this is a real phenomena is not evidence that it actually exists.
No, I'm sorry, you got this wrong. When you do that, you are not "calling" the cat, you are effectively controlling it with your mind eye. You need to be very careful with that, doing it long term can result in damage to the cat.
I don't know what to say other than I'm sad when I see reddit-ish comment chains like this on HN. Someday I'll be a big kid and be able to downvote, but in the mean time I shake my head.
I am picturing in my mind's eye someone beating you on the dome of your skull with an oversized elementary science textbook.
It is not generally useful to say someone else is "wrong" about their religion or superstitions, unless you have statistically significant data from a controlled, reproducible experiment that contradicts their implied hypothesis. Without the support of facts, you're just in a pissing contest over who writes the best fiction.
If you're going to talk about this on HN, in terms of correct or incorrect, you're going to need to show the differences in medical scanner images between cats that have been continually mind-controlled by psychic humans over their entire lifespans and control cats with similar breeds and ages.
Because of that, I'm not going to say that your hypothesis is wrong, as it remains untested, but I will say that it is so implausible that any research experiment intended to test it is very unlikely to get public funding.
> I am picturing in my mind's eye someone beating you on the dome of your skull with an oversized elementary science textbook.
Yeah well that's not going to work, obviously. You can't have both elementary science textbooks and mind-projecting them through a non-physical mystical plane of existence.
And even if it could be done, it'd be highly unethical. Imagine a non-corporeal entity finding out they've been violating physical conservation laws during their whole existence.
Okay let's get one part straight here. I don't believe any of this bullshit but I'm pretty sure I know a lot more about it than whatever you're making up right now.
The "mind's eye" is strictly input-only. Associated image of a silver mirror (or the Moon or my favourite, the pineal gland), which carries a reflection of the realm(s) of the Gods (or Godlike), which are beyond comprehension of mortal Man yadda-yadda etc, you can only witness the reflected image, which can be a divine/true vision or a false vision/hallucination (or a meaningless vision, or any combination thereof). Hence why the moon is associated with insanity.
I like reading about these kinds of things for fun, and because it has some weird and twisted yet surprisingly consistent logic to it (by which I mean, not very consistent but still surprisingly so). I've never read anything (outside the explicitly fictional) about it being hurtful to cats, though. And somehow I doubt you'd be able to provide me with a source either :)
> Sometimes the if the back door is closed and I'm not distracted by computer or something he "calls" me to open the door. Subjectively, I get this subtle "ping" that feels like "I should open the door for the cat" so I do and he's there waiting.
I've experienced similar things, as I have both small children and a very fat cat that doesn't like to jump over our toddler gate. I've been playing games with headphones on in an entirely separate room and suddenly felt that the cat wanted me to go open the gate. Sure enough, when I got there, he was waiting by the gate.
That said... I don't attribute this to telepathy. Animals get on schedules after a while, and perhaps it's likely that I merely intuited that the cat was very likely to want to go through the gate at that specific time.
It's like that episode of the Office where they put an increasing number of nickels in Dwight's phone handset over a long period, then take them out all at once and he smacks himself in the face with it - we humans often exhibit behaviors that are primarily driven by unconscious stimuli.
Yes, I have spent a lot of time out in nature and parks, and I generally am aware of not leaving a trace or litter. However, with something like a banana peel, I'd rather it end up as tree food the in a landfill, so I usually toss them in bushes.
The issue is that leaving food for the animals alters their behavior and can cause issues. You're probably not the worst offender wherever you are, as there are many people who just give food to animals, but the argument would be that it contributes to the problem.
Please don't do that with banana or orange peels, they remain present for a long time. I have no problem personally with people tossing apple cores in more remote, little-visited areas (though it still makes sense to crack down on such things a bit more in heavily visited areas like National Parks) but various peels don't rot well and remain in place.
I'm not sure about Yosemite or even nature in the US so maybe this wouldn't be an issue, but even biodegradable things like apple cores or egg shells can spread diseases to local populations of trees or birds. That's a real thing to take into account in natural parks with endemic species at least.
I don't have a link though, it's just something that was been repeated at length by the Natural Reserve agents and the ecobiologists to the personnel and visitors while I was on Kerguelen island (precisely about apple cores and egg shells - most of the vegetation is actually in the same Rosaceae family as apple trees, and there are many local bird species).
It makes sense to me, seeing how a single disease like chestnut blight or phylloxera can be very devastating to a population on a whole continent, it could be both as bad but also less noticeable in a natural park.
Here's a different perspective, which I will admit in advance is kind of ridiculous, but it makes me think...
Why are humans not considered to be a part of nature? I think it’s because we consider ourselves to be more intelligent than other animals/organisms and therefore assume it to be our responsibility to actively protect nature. However, this is based on our own moral standards, which were created by us, likely as a result of our ability to empathize.
A human eating an apple and discarding the core seems pretty natural to me (though it’s not, by definition). If this has an impact on the wildlife population, then perhaps it was “meant to be”.
Going out of our way to preserve nature seems more unnatural. Nature should have no expectation of our intelligence, so perhaps the human-caused destruction of the world is itself natural.
Then again, perhaps our increased intelligence is natural, so going out of our way to preserve nature is natural.
As you can see, I basically have no point here. It’s just an interesting thought train that I felt like expressing.
Of course, this argument could be extended to just about anything that a human does, including pumping oil directly into the ocean, which is why I’m not actually trying to argue this point.
I guess what I am saying is that if humans are left unregulated, nature seems to find a way to restore sanity. An example of this is the over prescription of antibiotics which has led to a decrease in their overall effectiveness. It seems like nature will always win in the end.
Unregulated humans have lead to the extinction of hundreds (thousands?) of species. Largely by hunting, but also unintentionally by destroying habitats. It's also a safety hazard: when you feed wild animals, they learn to associate humans with food and are more willing to approach humans, which places humans in danger. Aside from animal welfare, garbage is just disgusting. If one person sees an apple core, perhaps they'll assume it's OK to leave their Doritos bag, and someone else a beer bottle, and now the area is spoiled for everyone. Not to mention health hazards for both humans and animals from rotting food.
> If one person sees an apple core, perhaps they'll assume it's OK to leave their Doritos bag
Let me nuance that a little bit: They don't actually believe it's OK, they're really just lazy and inconsiderate. If they were actually unaware of the difference between food and plastic packaging, the problem would be solving itself.
Well, we're talking about a National Park. Which is a part of nature we explicitly try to keep unaffected by humans as much as possible. So elsewhere you may have an argument, but in this case any visitor influence on nature is bad.
I disagree. Discarding the core is unnatural. The only part of an apple that I discard is the stem.
I also ensure that I do not crush all of the seeds with my teeth, thus honoring "the deal" between fruit-bearing plants and animals (even though sewage treatment plants may be involved after the fact).
I draw the line at plums, though. Those are pretty much the largest fruit seeds that I will swallow whole. Peaches, you're out of luck.
But when you put toilets and sewers in the equation, tossing the seed-bearing portion of a fruit to another animal is probably the most natural thing you can do. The animal receiving the food has no cause to object. The plant that bore the fruit has no cause to object (unless it is seedless). And the only reason a human might object is if it somehow upsets the environmental equilibrium, such as if 10000 humans are all throwing their uneaten apple cores in the same place.
...like tourists at a national park.
When you're in a "natural" area that somehow gets a lot of human activity anyway, you're actually better off burning your garbage, and either packing out the ash if local soil is basic, or spreading it and peeing on it if the local soil is acidic.
That's not true. It depends on the plant species, but some seeds require physical or chemical abrasion of the seed coat before germination can occur. Some fruits have germination-inhibiting plant hormones in the fruit flesh, and cannot sprout until that is either digested or rotted away.
Some seeds require seasonal cycles of cold and hot, but that doesn't involve animals except insofar as they may cause the climate to shift.
That's not really why I swallow the seeds. I do it because it makes less of a mess to clean up after a meal or snack. Someone else might have to walk their apple core to a garbage can, and worry about whether it will rot and stink in there. I just put the stem on my desk and throw it in the landscaping mulch later.
Sure, throwing one apple core seems pretty natural. But a national park is full of visitors every day. If it isn't a strict policy not to throw trash and food where animals can scavenge it, they learn to expect and rely on it. This brings them in more frequent contact. With crows that's no big deal, perhaps an annoyance to visitors at worst. But other animals can be much more dangerous. Keeping a healthy fear of people in animals (and honestly of animals in people) is incredibly important.
The most extreme example of this is trash feeding bears in Yellowstone up until 1970. Humans naturally ate at hotels which naturally tossed their trash into giant piles nearby. Bears naturally came looking for all that food they smelled and naturally ate it. The humans then naturally started watching and the park naturally made that easier by putting up grandstands around the trash heaps.
Eventually a new Yellowstone park chief saw the ridiculousness and danger of this and stopped it. It then took a while for the bears to adapt their behavior back to their actual natural behavior without such a rich food source.
It was an apple grown in one of the 3 orchards around Yosemite purchased from the store in the valley. It was a native apple.
Also, I don't consider biodegradable native fruits to be trash. People argue the birds will choke on seeds or something which is absurd. I hike in Yosemite dozens of times a year and I can't recall ever seeing so much as banana peel and I know people are tossing those on the ground everywhere.
My wife and I picked up a seemingly injured young crow from our yard before the neighborhood cats (or buses) found it, and we took it to a local wounded bird shelter. The crow's family(?) crowed incessantly whenever we walked outside for a few months afterward. They would even start when we were several blocks away, coming home from farther out, and would follow us to our door. (The young crow apparently had a head injury, and we never heard back from the place on its recovery.)
> Each volunteer was either holding a dead crow, standing near a dead red-tailed hawk—a crow predator—or standing near a dead red-tailed hawk holding the dead crow.
I had to reread this about 5 times to make sense of it. Am I just tired from a long work day or is that a poorly phrase sentence?
Why was I down voted? Read the sentence again. Both meanings are syntactically correct. When I first read the article I took the 3rd case to be that the hawk was holding the dead crow, with the human standing nearby.
A couple of years ago, near dusk, I heard a hell of a bird ruckus and went out to the front porch to have a look. What I saw blew me away: a young coyote was making haste down the middle of the street, ears down and tail between its legs being pursued by a very noisy aggressive murder of crows. They literally chased him out of the neighborhood.
This can happen to people as well. I've heard stories about people throwing rocks at ravens in parks, where the ravens at later events responded by crapping on the person from up high, or throwing small rocks and twigs on him as they flew by.
Quote from the Quran 5:31 [1] "Then Allah sent a crow, who scratched the ground, to show him how to hide the dead body of his brother. 'Woe to me!' said he. 'Was I not even able to be as this raven, and to hide the shame of my brother?' Then he became full of regrets."
By the way, when there are crows around, do not stare or point at other birds' nests if you spot any among the tree branches. Crows are very good at reading human gestures. If they see a bunch of humans staring and pointing at something, they will understand that there is something of interest in that direction, and will inevitably find and destroy the nests.
On my way to work one morning I came across a raven funeral. I didn't know that's what it was at the time. All the ravens (Australian) were gathered broadly in a disk amongst the trees, there were about 20 of them, all quiet and quite still. I had a choice of routes, either through them or around them to the right, I chose the latter as I didn't want to disturb whatever they were doing.
241 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadFor instance, in 2008 Marzluff had researchers in caveman masks capture crows while others in a control mask—Dick Cheney—let the birds be. Afterward the birds ignored the harmless Cheneys but scolded and chased the cavemen, and did so for years.
Poor birds! Probably thought they could trust a Crow-Magnon.
Dick Cheney masks! Probably thought they could trust a Crow-Magnon. I have faith in the world again.
Has it ever been done before? A quick Google search didn't uncover anything.
At first I thought you ment like this: http://cyberneticzoo.com/bionics/1940-project-pigeon-1948-pr...
And don't even get me started on _jackdaws_.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaITA7eBZE
https://youtu.be/TtmLVP0HvDg
https://youtu.be/rIX_6TBeph0
EDIT: you can even hear it in their natural calls, they have a buzzing, saw-like texture in the upper-mid and high range.
https://youtu.be/KOFy8QkNWWs
PS: I think that crow actually said "thank you"?
Top level trolling
https://youtu.be/BGPGknpq3e0
Looking back after the lights turned green I could see the apple had been crushed by a car and the crow was gobbling up the delicious juicy apple mush.
It's amazing how the birds react when she catches one. They all go nuts, and more fly in and start squawking.
I worry they'll call in a hawk to carry her away lol.
usually dog tags on the collar is enough. Otherwise, have you ever thought about attaching a small bell to the collar so that it'd warn the birds before the dog catches them?
Hopefully she's learning that she gets a bath and I get grumpy every time it happens too.
My mom took him to the vet, who cleaned up the wounds and said that it was probably a juvenile who was overconfident in what he could grab. An adult wouldn't have tried.
The mental image of this teenager hawk swooping down, grabbing a fatass 15-pound cat, and struggling to pick it up while Mom looks down and shakes her head makes me smile.
Here's another example:
http://www.wrdw.com/home/headlines/Hawk-flies-away-with-fami...
https://youtu.be/60Zg9sGnQf8
BTW - I once read somewhere that its its illegal to keep native birds (like crows, robins etc).
There is a young girl in Seattle who made friends with the local crows by feeding them, they soon were bringing her regular gifts in exchange for her snacks - http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
I tried to do the same thing in my backyard for about three weeks until one day my wife caught me putting little pieces of bread on our porch railing. She asked what I was doing and I explained making friends with the crows (what else?!). She asked me to stop so I did.
My only hope is that they attack her now and not me, with some level of understanding that she was the one who ruined all the fun...
Edit: It's called "histoplasmosis".
http://www.thecrowbox.com/
When I was up on north dome (not to be confused with half dome) there was a group of raven's hanging out on the rocks watching us eat our late lunch. I had an apple core that I tossed to the side and watched as a raven warily tried to approach it. I walked over and grabbed the apple core before the raven could grab it so I could entertain myself teasing the raven for a bit before we started down the mountain. I started by putting my arm back ready to throw the apple and as I did that I noticed the raven kneel a bit as if getting ready to launch itself. I thought this was interesting as it showed it was anticipating me throwing the object based on my arm motion. As I relaxed my arm the bird also relaxed.
I tried grabbing a rock and again watched it brace itself to launch from the rock then tried switching the apple core and the rock behind my back and tossing the rock hoping the bird would dart after it thinking it was the core. The bird didn't do as I expected and instead just watched me carefully never motioning for the rocks.
I tore a piece of the apple from the core behind my back and tossed it just as I had with the rocks and before the piece of apple even left my hand the raven leaped from the rock in its direction.
This blew my mind. Not sure how the raven knew it was a chunk of apple and not a rock.
I messed around with that particular raven for a good 10-15 minutes tossing various things in its direction, testing its reactions and trying to mess with its little raven mind. All I managed to do however was be impressed at its level of experience in dealing with Yosemite tourists such as myself.
Have to ask - read only the article title?
don't you get that it was the raven that was playing with your little human mind ? ;-)
It was reading your thoughts.
Dogs and cats do it too.
A few years ago I went to a farm to buy a goat. The younger goats did not know why I was there, but when an older goat saw me and our eyes met, it knew, and took off.
In what sense do you mean reading minds? Genuine mind reading, or basically a kind of intuiting about human intention based on say, body language?
But we have domesticated dogs for a long time, and some might argue that they are a lot better and quicker to pick up on our body language, than we are at picking up on theirs.
Dog Behaviorists spend a lot of their not training dogs, but training dog owners to understand and read their dog.
And it's not just reading body language, but actual reading your thoughts. In the case of the crow, what body language tells it that the guy is about to throw a piece of rock or a bone when it can't SEE the object?
I know it's not something I can prove to you, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
Come on man.
Tons of things, from being able to understand body cues that the guy is up to some BS (like we can tell a liar), to smelling the thing he has in his hands...
Plus who said it "couldn't see the thing" in the first place? Even if it couldn't see what in his hand, it could have watched his moves before, as he left the apple and picked up the rock etc.
And by "genuine", he means "magical" ... :-)
It could have took off for 100000 reasons, non of which end being "because it read your mind".
For example: it got scared, it did it randomly, is afraid of strangers because it had some bad experience, etc...
But I'd expect it to be more likely to just be one of your simpler suggestions.
It's just bizarre to attribute it to mind reading, when we'd apply far more mundane reasons if we saw the same behaviour in people.
Sometimes the if the back door is closed and I'm not distracted by computer or something he "calls" me to open the door. Subjectively, I get this subtle "ping" that feels like "I should open the door for the cat" so I do and he's there waiting.
This sort of thing is pretty easy to develop. It's innate, you're already doing it, you just have to learn to pay attention and calibrate.
Unsubstantiated nonsense. Your perception that this is a real phenomena is not evidence that it actually exists.
It is not generally useful to say someone else is "wrong" about their religion or superstitions, unless you have statistically significant data from a controlled, reproducible experiment that contradicts their implied hypothesis. Without the support of facts, you're just in a pissing contest over who writes the best fiction.
If you're going to talk about this on HN, in terms of correct or incorrect, you're going to need to show the differences in medical scanner images between cats that have been continually mind-controlled by psychic humans over their entire lifespans and control cats with similar breeds and ages.
Because of that, I'm not going to say that your hypothesis is wrong, as it remains untested, but I will say that it is so implausible that any research experiment intended to test it is very unlikely to get public funding.
Yeah well that's not going to work, obviously. You can't have both elementary science textbooks and mind-projecting them through a non-physical mystical plane of existence.
And even if it could be done, it'd be highly unethical. Imagine a non-corporeal entity finding out they've been violating physical conservation laws during their whole existence.
The cat will "blow me off" sometimes if he's stalking or napping and doesn't want to come in.
The "mind's eye" is strictly input-only. Associated image of a silver mirror (or the Moon or my favourite, the pineal gland), which carries a reflection of the realm(s) of the Gods (or Godlike), which are beyond comprehension of mortal Man yadda-yadda etc, you can only witness the reflected image, which can be a divine/true vision or a false vision/hallucination (or a meaningless vision, or any combination thereof). Hence why the moon is associated with insanity.
I like reading about these kinds of things for fun, and because it has some weird and twisted yet surprisingly consistent logic to it (by which I mean, not very consistent but still surprisingly so). I've never read anything (outside the explicitly fictional) about it being hurtful to cats, though. And somehow I doubt you'd be able to provide me with a source either :)
I've experienced similar things, as I have both small children and a very fat cat that doesn't like to jump over our toddler gate. I've been playing games with headphones on in an entirely separate room and suddenly felt that the cat wanted me to go open the gate. Sure enough, when I got there, he was waiting by the gate.
That said... I don't attribute this to telepathy. Animals get on schedules after a while, and perhaps it's likely that I merely intuited that the cat was very likely to want to go through the gate at that specific time.
It's like that episode of the Office where they put an increasing number of nickels in Dwight's phone handset over a long period, then take them out all at once and he smacks himself in the face with it - we humans often exhibit behaviors that are primarily driven by unconscious stimuli.
edit: it's also illegal in national parks, carrying up to a $5000 fine and six months in jail
Apple cores I think might not be too bad to toss, ants can eat that up in a day or two.
I pack out the peels of any tropical fruit.
It makes sense to me, seeing how a single disease like chestnut blight or phylloxera can be very devastating to a population on a whole continent, it could be both as bad but also less noticeable in a natural park.
Why are humans not considered to be a part of nature? I think it’s because we consider ourselves to be more intelligent than other animals/organisms and therefore assume it to be our responsibility to actively protect nature. However, this is based on our own moral standards, which were created by us, likely as a result of our ability to empathize.
A human eating an apple and discarding the core seems pretty natural to me (though it’s not, by definition). If this has an impact on the wildlife population, then perhaps it was “meant to be”.
Going out of our way to preserve nature seems more unnatural. Nature should have no expectation of our intelligence, so perhaps the human-caused destruction of the world is itself natural.
Then again, perhaps our increased intelligence is natural, so going out of our way to preserve nature is natural.
As you can see, I basically have no point here. It’s just an interesting thought train that I felt like expressing.
Of course, this argument could be extended to just about anything that a human does, including pumping oil directly into the ocean, which is why I’m not actually trying to argue this point.
I guess what I am saying is that if humans are left unregulated, nature seems to find a way to restore sanity. An example of this is the over prescription of antibiotics which has led to a decrease in their overall effectiveness. It seems like nature will always win in the end.
Let me nuance that a little bit: They don't actually believe it's OK, they're really just lazy and inconsiderate. If they were actually unaware of the difference between food and plastic packaging, the problem would be solving itself.
I also ensure that I do not crush all of the seeds with my teeth, thus honoring "the deal" between fruit-bearing plants and animals (even though sewage treatment plants may be involved after the fact).
I draw the line at plums, though. Those are pretty much the largest fruit seeds that I will swallow whole. Peaches, you're out of luck.
But when you put toilets and sewers in the equation, tossing the seed-bearing portion of a fruit to another animal is probably the most natural thing you can do. The animal receiving the food has no cause to object. The plant that bore the fruit has no cause to object (unless it is seedless). And the only reason a human might object is if it somehow upsets the environmental equilibrium, such as if 10000 humans are all throwing their uneaten apple cores in the same place.
...like tourists at a national park.
When you're in a "natural" area that somehow gets a lot of human activity anyway, you're actually better off burning your garbage, and either packing out the ash if local soil is basic, or spreading it and peeing on it if the local soil is acidic.
You don't have to eat freaking pits out of fruit.
Some seeds require seasonal cycles of cold and hot, but that doesn't involve animals except insofar as they may cause the climate to shift.
That's not really why I swallow the seeds. I do it because it makes less of a mess to clean up after a meal or snack. Someone else might have to walk their apple core to a garbage can, and worry about whether it will rot and stink in there. I just put the stem on my desk and throw it in the landscaping mulch later.
The most extreme example of this is trash feeding bears in Yellowstone up until 1970. Humans naturally ate at hotels which naturally tossed their trash into giant piles nearby. Bears naturally came looking for all that food they smelled and naturally ate it. The humans then naturally started watching and the park naturally made that easier by putting up grandstands around the trash heaps.
Eventually a new Yellowstone park chief saw the ridiculousness and danger of this and stopped it. It then took a while for the bears to adapt their behavior back to their actual natural behavior without such a rich food source.
http://www.yellowstonepark.com/yellowstone-bears-no-longer-g...
Also, I don't consider biodegradable native fruits to be trash. People argue the birds will choke on seeds or something which is absurd. I hike in Yosemite dozens of times a year and I can't recall ever seeing so much as banana peel and I know people are tossing those on the ground everywhere.
I had to reread this about 5 times to make sense of it. Am I just tired from a long work day or is that a poorly phrase sentence?
Never forgive, never forget.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel_in_Islam
Douglas Hofstadter says that thinking is all about making analogies, so that is all pretty remarkable.
https://www.amazon.com/Surfaces-Essences-Analogy-Fuel-Thinki...
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/10/03/00/2D0746BE0000057...