noisy, attack people without a reason, kill other smaller birds, eat their eggs and nestling and take over their spot. I used to live in a neighbourhood with such a beautiful birds, now Crows took over an all I near in the morning is CRAAW CRAAW
Live in Davis next to an active freight train track that shakes the ground and tens of thousands of crows landing in the trees in the evening, hundreds per tree, then let me know how you like that. :)
They basically always have a good reason to attack people. If you get attacked by one, it's up to you to figure out why and then not do that again.
A lot of the time it's because you are getting too close to their nests during nesting season. Just take a different path in spring and let them look after their kids in peace.
Agreed. Birds have an inheren limit on head weight, which limits their brain size. They do manage to use what they have quite well (parrots are also remarkable in that regard), but the limit is there. Ultimately intelligence is a tough nut to crack for such a stupid and limited thing as evolution: some have a big brain but no hands, some have hands but cannot have a big brain because space is used for something else (e.g. bears), some have hands and space for brains but cannot increase head weight because not erect walking etc. Once you're erect, there's a tendency for arms to atrophy (think T-rex and ostriches). Jaws and the nasal cavity tend to take up space too, so an intelligent species needs to have weak olfactory sense and be a meat/fruit feeder. It's a miracle that a species like ours could combine all the necessary, quite fragile, ingredients to develop intelligence.
Nope, the anthropic principle does not imply that probability is 1. It's not even really a principle, just a post-factum observation. There may have been no one on Earth to write this stuff on a smartphone, ever. There might have even been no life in our Universe, ever. We shouldn't take these things for granted.
Crows are social too, will hold a grudge... you's swear they were part Irish.
A crow once sneaked quite far into my mechanic's shop without being seen, got up on a rolling toolbox and stole a bag of sunflower seeds without being noticed. I found this because I saw a crow and their other crow buddies were having a sunflower seed party in the alley, and one of the mechanics lost their snack.
Also, crows will remember if you help them for years. People make a point to make friends with them because they have been known to bring gifts and visit year after year. Probably better company than the in-laws too. There's a number of documentaries and personal videos on YouTube about this topic.
PS: Davis CA has zillions of crows. An apartment I rented had large trees at the street containing easily several thousand in a dozen trees where they bedded-down for the night. The sidewalks and streets were coated white with droppings like it was SF's Fisherman's Wharf. Needless to say, no one used those sidewalks. And you could hear when they came back, because it sounded like a crow cocktail party.
There is no need, but it is understandable as long as history is thought as dishonestly as it is in Britain.
It is not mandatory to teach in schools about bad deeds against irish, african, indian, carribean and more - manifest destiny is alive and well in our age of brexit. "A 2014 YouGov survey found that, out of 1741 British adults surveyed, 59 per cent reported that they were proud of the British Empire." Teaching about the holocaust is mandatory; but not britains own atrocities (source: https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/images/TIDE%20&%20%20... )
Actually there's no need for this comment, the mock-indignation on behalf of others.
A funny aside is always welcome in an otherwise substantial comment, and no, this is not considered racism or offending by 99% of Earth's population, including most Irish.
Irish are an ethnicity, not a race. They're the same race as I am (and probably the grandparent). And they make the same kind of jokes themselves all the time, like my people do the same kind of stereotype jokes for our own kind.
It's only "racism" in the provincial US preoccupation that "everything said that touches on a population/ethnicity/race is racism". Not in the "X are inferior/KKK/etc" sense, which is what we should be concerned with.
I, for one, don't appreciate taking lessons about how a joke is racist from people from a country that had slavery until the 19th century, segregation since the 1970s, and widespread systemic/popular/law enforcement racism problems today. As if their experience is the universal standard that should be applied to the global population here on the internet. That's, if not racist, surely imposing upon others...
Racism is often considered antagonism based on race or ethnicity. The terms are very closely linked, though it may have been better for me to say "ethnicity."
>Not in the "X are inferior/KKK/etc" sense, which is what we should be concerned with
So what grudges do you think the Irish held leading to this stereotype?
I don't get the rest of your argument. It seems to be "my country doesn't have a problem with racism so racist comments are fine."
>I don't get the rest of your argument. It seems to be "my country doesn't have a problem with racism so racist comments are fine."
It's more "A culture that has historically had heavy racism problems should not export their overcompensating hysteria that everything touching on ethnicity/race is racism and consider its own preoccupations universally applicable".
>So what grudges do you think the Irish held leading to this stereotype?
My god, all those links refer to Irish Americans. If anything, it shows that Americans hold grudges throughout generations. It's quite telling that an American conflates Irish-Americanism with being 'Irish'. The hyphen is there for a reason.
I'm curious where you're from that you think doesn't have a similar history, but it still boils down to "if you don't have a racism problem it's not actually racist." I don't get that logic, you can argue it's not harmful but it's still racism.
>Why not ask the Irish themselves?
I find it strange that all the Irish you are asking are speaking English, but the Irish Times hits why this is offensive.
>Well, Brian, the record so far is a whopping 800 years: this being the period, rounded down to the nearest century, for which we claim to have been oppressed by the English.
Everything else listed is fairly standard, and you could make similar articles for any ethnicity.
>I'm curious where you're from that you think doesn't have a similar history, but it still boils down to "if you don't have a racism problem it's not actually racist." I don't get that logic
Note that I never said "If a place doesn't have a racism problem then them doing racist acts is OK / it's not racist".
My argument is "Places with heavy racist history tend to look at all kind of non-racist acts as racist, either from guilt or to overcompensate, and then try to force their hyper-sensitivity on others".
Instead of getting sensitive about stereotypes like "Irish can hold a grudge", "the Italians like pasta", "Scots are tightwads", "Germans have no humor", "Greeks are fiscally irresponsible", "Asians do everything better" or whatever as "racism", better act on actual racism, like systemic racism, redlining, over-representation of blacks in what's the biggest prison population in the world, racist cop shootings, college admissions, under-funded districts, WASP domination, etc.
>My argument is "Places with heavy racist history tend to look at all kind of non-racist acts as racist, either from guilt or to overcompensate, and then try to force their hyper-sensitivity on others".
Even if this is true, that was a racist statement for the reasons I originally outlined. That doesn't change if Irish say it, and it is of the "x are inferior sense" you mention. That's what has me confused,
>Instead of... act on...
So I should better prioritise the racism I address in my country, ignoring smaller examples until I can fix major ones? I tend to just address the ones I encounter, though I think understanding that past treatment can still cause current problems we need to address is an important message.
I don't actually care, I just wanted to point it out to you, so that you understand how strongly it's colouring your views. We all have our biases, and we should all be aware of them.
And you hail from some magical fairy land with no history of oppressing others, so it's clearly fine to make light of Irish oppression. Only an American would find that action racist.
Stereotyping can be a tool of racism, but to do that I think it needs to imply the inferiority or superiority of an ancestry-group. It's not clear to me that holding a grudge is either a positive or negative quality.
Only in the sense that they concern "race" (and loosely, since here it's an ethnicity).
So, in the same sense that preferring to have sex with women (or men) is "sexism" since "Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender."
Just not the kind of sexism that e.g. Weinstein peddled.
Just because we call what a bigot or KKK member does racism and making a comment that touches on ethnicity or race "racism" doesn't mean those are the same things, or that both are bad.
The concept of race is not looked on favorably in anthropology anymore, anway. It's better to speak of ancestry groups, as this does not imply biological homogeneity the way 'race' does. Besides, I think for a long time, the concept of race and ethnicity were tied up together, so, 'Racism' is an appropriate way to describe antisemitism, for example. Race is as much a social construct as ethnicity, so the distinction between them was loose from the start.
it's an Irish joke, that speaks the the Irish sense of humor. Irish people will jab at the Irish way all day long. It's really not offensive; certainly not as offensive as someone else coming along and deciding to be offended on others' behalf. lighten up.
I think you'll find that your opinion is rather hard line on this... compared to the vast majority of actual racist type behavior, and actual putdowns based on <ethnicity>, this is mildly amusing and speaks to a general behavior.
You're of course entirely welcome to keep your speech pure, but know that there's a full grayscale here and we all have different tolerances.
My GF and I went to the beach about a month ago and took our dog.
The crows weren't frightened at ALL of our dog. They realized they could basically just 'float' up in the air when he came by using the breeze.
The fact that they were amazingly calm about it was really telling.
Second. We hid our stuff under a blanket. They realize it's still there as they have item persistence. So they lifted up the blanket, went into our bag, then started opening up everything.
They opened up lids. They went through my girlfriends purse. They took out all the items from her purse. They took the socks out of my shoes. They opened plastic containers.
They systematically went through all our belongings.
And BOY did they score. All our dogfood. All of our leftover lunch, etc.
I saw a crow steal a credit card off an outdoor table in Seattle once. They really are remarkable animals. Also I swear they have regional accents to their calls.
Here in Australia most people now buy food and drink by tapping their bank cards on a reader. Can't be long now until a particularly smart crow sees this at a beach side shop, and steals a card to copy this. Is a shopkeeper obligated to serve other species? I for one will welcome our new flying thief overlords.
Joshua Klein built a crow vending machine with some success (using coins). Tap to pay could be quite a bit more profitable, though I assume you'd have a pretty high chargeback rate.
His research claims have been disputed, and an initially favorable NYT story about him ended up being retracted. I think he probably can't be cited anymore as a credible source on the question of crow intelligence.
I think I saw a video of some bird puzzle where they have to tap the right thing with their beak to get a treat. It doesn't seem too far removed from entering a PIN code. I bet you could teach them to do that.
Also, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think they would learn to insert a credit card into the machine given that they're good at manipulating sticks and stones and putting them into places.
> Also I swear they have regional accents to their calls.
Its actually true they do this. Two noted ornithologist's describes it in one of their books on crows:
As ornithologist John M. Marzluff and author Tony Angell noted in their 2005 book In the Company of Crows and Ravens, the calls these birds use "vary regionally, like human dialects that can vary from valley to valley." And there's more: If a crow changes its social group, the bird will try to fit in by talking like the popular guys. "When crows join a new flock," Marzluff and Angell wrote, "they learn the flock's dialect by mimicking the calls of dominant flock members."
I live in an area that's got crows and ravens -- the ravens don't come into the city much, except for large forested parks. The crows in such parks have a few calls similar to the ravens. To me, it sounds like a rural dialect -- which is reinforced by my observations that crows don't seem to talk like that in noisier parts of the city.
I was in Nepal having breakfast. Some crows are sitting there watching me eat. I look down to read my book, and in not more than a few seconds, I hear the clinking of dishes. I look up and the crows are flying off with my toast and jam. It was right in front of me, but they were quick enough to get in and out before I could react.
I realized that they are probably aware of my lack of attention to my food and that their in-built modeling of other agents had given them an advantage in this situation. I thought it was pretty impressive.
Speaking of corvids. Magpies are ones of the more social birds, I'm always amazed how vocal and varied their communications are. You could teach them to speak simple phrases. They can engage in gang violence (especially between two groups of juveniles). Magpies can establish "friendship" with crows if it helps them scavenge food.
I once watched three ravens raid a McDonald's trash can.
Two of them held the "flap" open, and the third went in for fries. Once they'd made a decent pile on the ground outside the can, they all set in to feast.
I had lunch with a crow in Austin once! It was my favorite experience. I was having pizza on an outside table on 3rd/2nd ave, and a Crow was standing nearby looking at me, probably waiting until I finished so it could swoop in on the left-overs. I motioned it to come closer, left a bit of pizza on top of the table, and it flew up on the table with me. Then I'd munch on a bite, tear off a piece for the crow, and it would eat the piece. Went like that for like 20 minutes before I had to get back to work, but it was so cute. I had a little crow buddy! :)
Why do programmers talk about living beings in software terminology, it's so clinical and cold. Other species are sentient beings, but for many it helps combat cognitive bias by not thinking of them as such.
I've observed Grand Canyon South Rim is a great example. They actively work the tourists who make hand-to-mouth gestures and steal when items are unguarded. Their team strategizing while hacking bear-proof garbage cans is impressive, too. One handles the door/partition while one or more enters for the snacks. I spent 1/2 a day watching them.
Gulls are pretty smart too. I've seen a flock case out a tourist as they set up their beach blanket. Once the tourist turns their back, they swoop in.
I've seen a one pull a closed brown lunch bag out of a freshly opened backpack, meaning the knew backpacks probably have food and brown bags are worth stealing and inspecting in detail elsewhere.
I was at a beach where I was younger where people routinely fed the fish dog food. The fish had learned to recognize this and would swarm the person feeding them. The gulls in turn would actually step on the fish to get to the food.
Clearly, gulls are the honey badger of the bird world!
My wife grew up here in IL, we were visiting New England where I grew up and spent a day on Hampton Beach, her, I, and my daughter.
They started a game of using McD's french fries as lures to get the beach gulls to swoop in on unsuspecting kids as they were playing... sometimes 20 or 30 gulls at a time.
Felt like dropping spotter rounds for airstrikes.
(No children were harmed, just many french fries tossed instead of consumed.)
I wonder how kea (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea) compared to crows in terms of intelligence. I’ve heard those things are more than capable of breaking into vehicles.
I remember seeing a program a while back which was comparing crows and kea and they concluded the kea was marginally smarter. Although, of course, that's related to the specific test they set - different tests might yield different results. They definitely are smart, tho
Birds' intelligence is especially interesting because the ontogeny differs from that of primates and other mammals like the dolphins. Maybe it can help triangulate our views about intelligence and give parallax insight into what general intelligence is and what to expect of AI without resorting to anthropocentric Turing test arguments only.
I believe that people have a strong aversion to doing this. So many still refuse to believe Darwin for suggesting that we are closely related to other animals. Imagine the pushback for stating that we are just another species with higher intelligence? That hits us humans where we think we are really special and important. This keeps AI research safely in bed with ANNs that pose no threat to discovering deep and unflattering truths about ourselves and our place on Earth.
They also like to annoy other animals. I have seen it now a few times that a crow or a group of
crows would approach a dog from behind and nip their tail or butt. When the dog turns around the crow will jump back a little and pretend it has nothing to do with this. When the dog looks away they will do it again. I have seen similar behavior with swans. When my dog chases they get out of the way but only the minimum needed.
They also do this to cats, which is much more dangerous. There's a video with a cat catching a bird (not a crow) that did this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nfIQifAcm0g
In that case, yes. It was just to illustrate that cats are eerily effective at catching birds mid-flight.
But I have seen a cat trotting along a wire fence with a concrete base. On that base, which was about the cat's height there was a hooded crow happily scuttering behind the cat and grabbing at its tail from time to time.
The cat mostly ignored it but it was apparent that it judges the chances of catching the pesky bird.
To me, the "will they mess with other animals for giggles" and "do they recognize other intelligent animals" are the barrier for entry into the "intelligence" consideration.
Dolphins (including orca) do, primates do, the article says crows do. Cats and dogs do too.
This article focuses mostly on problem solving, planning, and tool use as the primary hallmarks of intelligence. But what problem does writing a poem solve? Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem? What about the intelligence need to compose a great whale song[1]? Or paint a great painting?
These are things not measured on intelligence tests and that don't fit well in to scientific experiments because they can't be "objectively" judged or quantified, but my intuition is that they do in fact have to do with intelligence -- just not the sort of intelligence that problem solving, planning, and tool use demonstrate. Though they may require problem solving, planning, or tool use to accomplish, there seems to be something else going on there.
I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams quote: "... on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons."
[1] - ...if such criteria could be applied to them -- we don't know, and that's part of the point. If we don't know how can we judge one animal who does one thing to be "smarter" than another who does something else?
Maybe the requirement of starting with problem solving to establish is an issue with the audience and not the author. Imagine starting out by showing the sorts of innovative play that crows engage in, and no one (or at least during blind peer review) would accept it as evidence of intelligence, even if it is.
My point had to do with writers of great poetry being (arguably) intelligent, not with claiming that non-poets (or non-poetry readers) are not intelligent.
In other words, writing great poetry is a sign of intelligence, but not a requirement for intelligence.
Conversely, being good at problem solving, tool use, and planning might also be signs of intelligence, but maybe not requirements for intelligence either.
>My point stands: Would humans without poetry not be considered intelligent? Hardly.
They would be considered less intelligent than humans that have developed speech, and later poetry and other refined forms of expression.
The same way humans that painted their caves are considered more intelligent than the humanoids that proceeded them, that weren't as able to express themselves.
I don't agree. Perhaps an entity that is more intelligent than humans will determine that poetry is not worth it and there is a more advanced art form it uses instead.
Nowadays, most of us are not painting caves.
All I take from this article is that there's no consensus among experts whether speech was possible for homo sapiens' ancestors.
> Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these features could have evolved for other reasons, like singing. Neanderthals may have lacked the cognitive abilities for language, but possessed the physical anatomy for musical calls to attract mates or sooth infants.
Seems to imply that speech was physically possible for neanderthals (and by extension, their common ancestor with homo sapiens), but there's no agreement among experts that it means that neanderthals did speak.
Because poetry had a more day to day use than that. The rhythm and the rhyming is a mnemonic device. It makes it much easier to remember a text than when spoken in prose.
I can't imagine even our early ancestors not making use of that. In fact the earliest literature was passed from generation to generation as an oral tradition.
I just finished reading the book 'Gifts of the Crow' by Marzluff & Angell, which is a popularization of current research into Corvid intelligence, consisting of anecdotes, experiments, and neuroscience.
Academics do, in fact, study recreation & play, language & song, and expressions of emotion like grief. They are considered indicators of some kind of intelligence worth studying. The book even devotes a chapter to each of those topics!
I think larger the population, larger the hyperconnection less interesting/impactful is individual intelligence and creativity. What will overshadow individuals is what the group intelligence/creativity produces.
>This article focuses mostly on problem solving, planning, and tool use as the primary hallmarks of intelligence. But what problem does writing a poem solve?
The problem of expressing yourself to a specific, deeper, degree than with mere talk? And/or (in olde times, when poems where meant to be accompanied by music/oration) creating something people can be entertained with and sing/dance too.
>Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem?
Yes. Mind you, it doesn't mean it's technical intelligence, the kind that solves math problems etc. It's intelligence with words, wordplay, expression, feelings, ways of seeing, etc.
Quantification seems to be the degradation of perception towards the proper understanding of human ability. It seems realistic to say that humans prefer simple matrices with which to view reality.
Consider when someone common argues politics, but their first inclination is to fall back to statistics. They have now canceled out the component sum of all other elements in the set of understanding, only to rely on numbers as the indicator of truth.
Boethius once wrote about the 10 properties of man, one being number, and the others being place, position, attributes...etc. Yet, most of these are rarely used when you really get down to it.
Ezra Pound once made a statement that poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost.
And there really lies the connection I mean to give. Poetry is that which embraces Boethius' 10 properties including the numeric. Math in the most pure sense is focused only on quantity until it is applied to a context. (Physics, etc).
Language in itself is, discounting the vocal portions, a tool of symbolic manipulation. And from this one can generate a theory of linguistics, much like the Greeks, as that which binds symbols to images within a context, and the intended excitation of the senses.
Even math is explained and used as bound symbols within a context followed by a sort of kinesthetic sense.
Atop both of these, respectively, is grammar and the rules of mathematics.
Anyway, this is getting too long for a comment but this is my point.
- I think language and math are under a unified form of intelligence because the utilities used to perform them reach towards the same foundation.
- Poetry and writing is underappreciated not because it is technically inept, but for the reason that society has currently degraded it's understanding towards a single attribute (the numeric) and interprets anything that isn't a number as something which must originate from emotion.
- Emotion is hard to quantify so it is viewed as a isolated creative art that is not perceived as a criteria for what people mean when they think about intelligence.
- The author and the poet can and should be using their art with a technical foundation.
- Our current writers actually imply the state of society far greater than we think, which is ironic because they have the power to lead society.
- Intelligence tests as a metric imply an end result which is numeric. This is not a whole picture. Even if the number is representative of an abstract process used to indicate the success of solving a problem.
In other, other words, writing is viewed as a lesser art when it comes to quantifying intelligence because it is incompatible with such a motion in a world where the only viewpoint funnels into the numeric. It is also lesser because the quality of contemporary writing has a stark contrast to those works before us.
I really wish we had better definitions for "smart", "cognition", and "intelligence." With our current definitions, all comparisons are purely subjective. Maybe crows are the "smartest" today. Tomorrow it'll be dolphins, parrots, elephants, pigs, or cephalopods. Who knows?
There are things that other animals can do which humans can't, such as an octopus communicating with a grouper fish, two entirely different species, by changing the color and patterns of their skin, to corral and trap a prey (as seen on a segment of BBC's Blue Planet.)
Are humans "dumber" if we use that objective criteria to compare intelligence?
> Are humans "dumber" if we use that objective criteria to compare intelligence?
We have advanced communication with our domesticated animals, especially dogs. Also have some communication with non domesticated animals like primates, dolphins, etc..
There are also videos on youtube of crows that learned to wait for the walk signal to walk into a crosswalk to drop off a hard nut shell that car tires then crush and they then walk back out to pick up the now exposed food.
I've seen crows do this on my own neighborhood, both on side streets with little traffic, and on main streets on the crosswalk. I had heard of crows doing this in Japan but was impressed to see this in central Europe (although it's corvus cornix, the grey-black kind, not the full black one)
We have crows and jackrabbits in our neighborhood. You drive down the road toward a bunch (I think they prefer the term "murder") of crows having a meeting in the middle of the road. They'll eventually start nonchalantly strolling to the side at a calm, measured pace perfectly timed to just barely get out of the way as you pass and stroll back again, no feathers ruffled.
Jackrabbits will be sitting safely in the grass on the side of the road, see you coming, watch until you're about to pass, have a panic attack, and sprint in front of your car just as you pass in order to "escape". I never slow down for crows. They know what they're doing. I slow down for my fellow mammals, jackrabbits, because they're nitwits. All I can say, looking at these birds and these rabbits, is: that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and took out the competition sure was a lucky break for us.
Oh yes!
I live in a mostly rural area with lots of roaming fauna. Deer, hares, hedgehogs, cats of course, martens, rodents, foxes, all kinds of birds. Both when driving privately and when at work as a bus driver, I am observant and conscientious about all this wildlife: The roads are full of roadkill, which both saddens and angers me - but none of it is mine; I keep my eyes on the road, and I slow down for everybody.
Except for the crows and the rooks. I keep an eye on them, and keep a foot poised for braking, but I never have to. They stroll, as you describe it, quite nonchalantly out the way, sometimes leaving a walnut for my vehicle to please crush. And here's the thing: They happily stroll into the opposite lane, if - and only if - no cars are approaching from the opposite direction. Complete grasp of the traffic situation, and they hardly ever fail - during the last year, I have seen one dead crow at the roadside; I'm gessing he took cool one step to far.
To be fair though, birds have had to adapt long ago to evaluating the movement of very fast moving objects, while rabbits and most mammals have not really had to cope with fast speeds until humans invented cars just a century ago.
Staying still (minimizing visibility through motion detection) and then moving at the last moment is better avoidance strategy for a bird of prey, unless there's an actual hole they can disappear down.
Where I live, an island right by the mainland, birds of prey are not allowed. If one shows up, the crows will all take to the air, maybe fifty to a hundred of them, and will yell and chase the bird of prey until it leaves the island. Once it is over water, they will give a few last screams and turn around and go back to their business.
I've seen a bird of prey try to dive and swoop low over the land to evade them. They'll follow, some diving down low after it and some at a distance to keep an eye on it, until it's gone.
We basically have a crow air force keeping all the other birds and little mammals safe.
There are many bird species that do the same. Last year in Rotterdam, Netherlands they released a trained American bald eagle from a highrise building to fly to a designated spot across the river. It never arrived there as it was attacked from all sides by other birds, mostly seagulls, and chased across the city. It took hours to find the eagle, and when they did the poor beast was exhausted.
That's strength in numbers. I saw two crows trying this against an eagle,... I think they only survived that because the eagle was too lazy and figured it was easier to just grab some trainer-provided food after the show. Mind, the crows probably didn't recognize the huge bird, since they're not native here. That one "belonged" to a small wildlife reservoir. The trainer said it was more like he agreed to stay there in exchange for free lunch; which meant after a show the bird would occasionally hit the road for a few days, if he felt like it.
But to be fairer (to crows), I've witnessed crows just cross the yellow painted lines in a road to get to safety. They've adapted to our traffic rules.
They 'bomb' the street with walnuts where i live to open them. That's smart but not that impressive. What's impressive is - they don't do it on the parking lots where cars rarely drive, nor on the main road where cars drive constantly. They target pedestrian crossing near the main road, wait for cars to crack the walnut, then eat it.
They understand where the perfect number of cars is gonna be.
humans are able to take concepts and and predict with 100% accuracy what will happen next without trial and error. We also have arithmetic which also is not trial and error.
In Davis, CA they would perch on power lines holding a walnut in one claw, positioned over on of the wheel paths, and wait until a car was approaching in the appropriate position, and then drop the walnut just before the car arrived. They had a pretty good success rate.
Others just dropped them from high altitudes. I suspect the ones on the power lines were just showing off; as much fun as need.
They try to be stealthy and when the car is still going at them they run diagonally towards it, to make it turn and lose momentum. It's a good strategy vs bigger heavy predators, just not vs cars.
The reason rabbits and squirrels run into the car is because they assume it’s like other predators and not taking a path. Squirrels are trying to “juke” and anticipating that the car will respond to that.
I have to think that over time squirrels must be evolving due to cars. I do see dead ones, but I often see them running across the road, and notably not zigzagging. They still don't seem to have a sense of how close and how fast a car is moving though. I've seen a coyote not only assess the trajectory of my car, but change its mind about crossing the road in front of me once I demonstrated I had no traction in the snow.
Squirrels make a beeline for the nearest vertical surface they can climb and hide behind. This is what makes them dangerous to bicycles because they will run through wheels on their mission to get to the tree.
Pigeons do the exact same though, I never slow down for them because I know they always fly out of the way just in time, even when it looks like you're about to roll over them.
Pigeons have been trained to discriminate between different styles of art [1], which suggests complex, adaptable, visual processing and skill retention. So they may not be a great example of a bird that can only exhibit simple behaviours.
Well, you should. Pigeons can have an illness or fights that make them loose some toes and because of this, they can walk slowly or not react as fast as the others. One day I saw one on the street while a truck was comming fast towards it. I heard pretty clear a "plop" sound, like the sound of a bag exploding. I just hear it because I didn't want to look at it. It's not the kind of image you want to remember.
I still remember seeing a bird die when I was a small child. The bird was in the street right next to an intersection, and a car made a right turn at the intersection and caught the bird unaware.
I thought the same until I almost got a pigeon trapped in my bicycle pedal! It got dragged along for several seconds before it managed to flap away. Not one of the bright ones, I guess.
On the other hand, if you are out driving and there's a flock of Canadian Geese walking across the road, try only slowing down to 5 to 10 mph. They are used to people stopping until they finish crossing so they freak out when you don't.
Note: I generally do not advocate purposely messing with animals, but geese are evil! Also don't do this if there are young that might not be able to get out of the way in time.
I agree. I only have ever had one person correct me on this, who was, incidentally, Canadian. It's rather infuriating because the Latin name is literally 'from Canada'...which we already have a term for(Canadian). If anything, it feels like Canada Goose is a bad translation that people stick to.
I've lived in ID and MT (bordering BC and Alberta) for most of my life and people mostly say canadian geese even though I've heard that canada geese is preferred.
Canada Geese are not evil, they just don't take shit from humans. They can be very chill (after they have mated). They flock to my university every year and they will walk side by side around campus with the students like they're one of them.
Cats and dogs are smarter in every sense of the word. More neurons for one, but the most obvious reason is their ability to convey emotion. Emotion is by far the deepest level of reasoning because it has the ability to transcend pure Darwinism. Emotion is what separates the natural brain from the quantum computer version. True AI is emotion + reason. Without learning from the past, and applying a multiplier based on the severity of the consequence, we cannot accurately foresee potential warning signs of impending doom which is not very intelligent at all. This is why libtards like Dang are so smart.
Yes that is true. But birds feel less than cats and dogs. They have less neurons. This is a stupid article but god knows people on this site love to read articles and then parrot them as fact immediately after
Previously I heard about crows in Japan leaving nuts on the way of the cars to crash them when traffic lights are red and collecting them the next cycle. This summer I witnessed the exact same thing when I was driving through a particularly jammy traffic light here in Europe.
Are these crows inventing the method over and over again independently, like scientists finding the same thing at the same time in different parts of the world? Is this some very basic instinct that the crows evolved into? Are they teaching each other and now the Euro crows using Japanise tech? Fascinating creatures.
Exact thing happened to me one or two days ago. I was driving home and on a small street near my apartment a crow flew out of the bushes and dropped something right in front of the car and then it landed on the other side of the street. When I looked back in the mirror, the crow had gone back to collect what looked like a walnut.
On a semi-related note, magpies are also doing really well in that race. End of last year I started leaving oatmeal in a bottle cap on my terrace and every morning a magpie came to eat it every single day over the course of 2 months. And every evening when I came back home I had a handful of sticks, stones and berries left somewhere. No idea what I was supposed to do with them but thanks magpie I guess...
I read an article about crows in Australia killing a very poisonous frog. They are able to teach each other was the conclusion of that article. I don't have time atm to find the article.
For what it's worth, crows in Central Europe have been doing this for decades. They (carrion crows) used to do it outside my childhood home in Austria ~25 years ago. (Very light traffic, so no traffic lights; they just put some nuts in place when they heard a car coming.) They would generally first attempt to crack the nuts simply by dropping them onto the road from a height. I guess they left the ones that didn't crack on impact at terminal velocity for the cars to deal with.
There may well have been multiple independent discoveries, and passing the skill on between individuals and generations has probably made it near-ubiquitous now.
I wonder if what makes humans "intelligent" is exactly this. Plus we have a 70-90 years of life. Which is long enough to learn and do stuff, compare that to 10-15 years for your average crow.
We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.
Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.
That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.
tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.
I'd say it still takes a lot of intelligence for all that training to be effective. If we were much dumber it wouldn't even help. Long life is probably necessary but definitely not sufficient.
My 10 year old can start a fire, create a shelter, gather/sterilize water, hunt, trap, clean game and cook it. Humans are scary smart compared to other life and can easily pickup survival skills, manipulate their environments to suit them, even as a child.
Sounds like a good theory, until you think about animals like parrots and turtles. Both of those have lifespans that are about as long as that of humans, and no doubt they are very intelligent (esp. pronounced with parrots), but not smart enough to be able to support your hypothesis.
How so? My hypothesis is that if a human is not exposed to this curricula of learning, he'll be close to these animals in intelligence. I don't know of any such humans. I also don't know of any such parrot that was given a learning program for 25 years.
When I was ~10 years old, I found a fake decorative crow (Halloween stuff) and I figured out that I could jump up and down with the fake crow and it would only be a matter of time before a few real crows would start circling... 15 minutes later there would be 100 circling, then thousands. It became a party trick that I'd show friends every now and then.
I always assumed it was because they thought I was attacking one of their flock, like they were trying to intimidate me. They never came close or swooped down or anything. Just circled hundreds of feet above.
From my experience they have strong social connection, whenever a crow died within few minutes there would murder of crows circling that area like paying your final respects. Absolutely beautiful creatures!
Country folk assure me that crows can also not only tell the difference between a gun and a stick, but they also have a pretty good idea of what the effective range of the gun is.
That crow is a little over confident. 40 yards isn't all that hard on a crow size target with at .22 pistol, with practice. Back up about another 20 yards and the crow is probably pretty safe.
My father often tries to shoot the crows in his garden. However, as soon as he opens the door with a rifle they take off. I'm secretly always rooting for the crows.
I was recently reading the Wikipedia page about comparative neuron counts in the brains of various animals. The most notable observation to me at the time was that ravens have a similar neuron count that of to pigs and dogs--far more than cats, for example.
It seems neuron counts matter, but at the same time they don't have a big effect?
Elephants are intelligent but not that much per the number of cells. Raccons are probably more intelligent than cats and have more neurons, ok. And why are Capybaras surprisingly high on the list?
442 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 359 ms ] threadA lot of the time it's because you are getting too close to their nests during nesting season. Just take a different path in spring and let them look after their kids in peace.
The Anthropic Principle says this combination must have happened with probability 1, otherwise there would be noone to observe it not happening.
A crow once sneaked quite far into my mechanic's shop without being seen, got up on a rolling toolbox and stole a bag of sunflower seeds without being noticed. I found this because I saw a crow and their other crow buddies were having a sunflower seed party in the alley, and one of the mechanics lost their snack.
Also, crows will remember if you help them for years. People make a point to make friends with them because they have been known to bring gifts and visit year after year. Probably better company than the in-laws too. There's a number of documentaries and personal videos on YouTube about this topic.
PS: Davis CA has zillions of crows. An apartment I rented had large trees at the street containing easily several thousand in a dozen trees where they bedded-down for the night. The sidewalks and streets were coated white with droppings like it was SF's Fisherman's Wharf. Needless to say, no one used those sidewalks. And you could hear when they came back, because it sounded like a crow cocktail party.
There's no need for this.
I realise now that I very badly misunderstood the article :)
It is not mandatory to teach in schools about bad deeds against irish, african, indian, carribean and more - manifest destiny is alive and well in our age of brexit. "A 2014 YouGov survey found that, out of 1741 British adults surveyed, 59 per cent reported that they were proud of the British Empire." Teaching about the holocaust is mandatory; but not britains own atrocities (source: https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/images/TIDE%20&%20%20... )
How's about we allow a little local flavor while people tell their stories?
>PS: Davis CA has zillions of crows
Meanwhile: Why Irish grudges are passed on - a long tradition of never forgetting https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/why-irish...
I am Irish and live in Ireland.
A funny aside is always welcome in an otherwise substantial comment, and no, this is not considered racism or offending by 99% of Earth's population, including most Irish.
It's only "racism" in the provincial US preoccupation that "everything said that touches on a population/ethnicity/race is racism". Not in the "X are inferior/KKK/etc" sense, which is what we should be concerned with.
I, for one, don't appreciate taking lessons about how a joke is racist from people from a country that had slavery until the 19th century, segregation since the 1970s, and widespread systemic/popular/law enforcement racism problems today. As if their experience is the universal standard that should be applied to the global population here on the internet. That's, if not racist, surely imposing upon others...
Racism is often considered antagonism based on race or ethnicity. The terms are very closely linked, though it may have been better for me to say "ethnicity."
>Not in the "X are inferior/KKK/etc" sense, which is what we should be concerned with
So what grudges do you think the Irish held leading to this stereotype?
I don't get the rest of your argument. It seems to be "my country doesn't have a problem with racism so racist comments are fine."
It's more "A culture that has historically had heavy racism problems should not export their overcompensating hysteria that everything touching on ethnicity/race is racism and consider its own preoccupations universally applicable".
>So what grudges do you think the Irish held leading to this stereotype?
Why not ask the Irish themselves?
https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/why-irish...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/nurturing-a-grudge-1.315764
https://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/50-year-itch-epic-grudge...
Or on a funny note:
https://lovin.ie/news/feature/18-petty-things-that-irish-peo...
I'm curious where you're from that you think doesn't have a similar history, but it still boils down to "if you don't have a racism problem it's not actually racist." I don't get that logic, you can argue it's not harmful but it's still racism.
>Why not ask the Irish themselves?
I find it strange that all the Irish you are asking are speaking English, but the Irish Times hits why this is offensive.
>Well, Brian, the record so far is a whopping 800 years: this being the period, rounded down to the nearest century, for which we claim to have been oppressed by the English.
Everything else listed is fairly standard, and you could make similar articles for any ethnicity.
Note that I never said "If a place doesn't have a racism problem then them doing racist acts is OK / it's not racist".
My argument is "Places with heavy racist history tend to look at all kind of non-racist acts as racist, either from guilt or to overcompensate, and then try to force their hyper-sensitivity on others".
Instead of getting sensitive about stereotypes like "Irish can hold a grudge", "the Italians like pasta", "Scots are tightwads", "Germans have no humor", "Greeks are fiscally irresponsible", "Asians do everything better" or whatever as "racism", better act on actual racism, like systemic racism, redlining, over-representation of blacks in what's the biggest prison population in the world, racist cop shootings, college admissions, under-funded districts, WASP domination, etc.
Even if this is true, that was a racist statement for the reasons I originally outlined. That doesn't change if Irish say it, and it is of the "x are inferior sense" you mention. That's what has me confused,
>Instead of... act on...
So I should better prioritise the racism I address in my country, ignoring smaller examples until I can fix major ones? I tend to just address the ones I encounter, though I think understanding that past treatment can still cause current problems we need to address is an important message.
So, in the same sense that preferring to have sex with women (or men) is "sexism" since "Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex or gender."
Just not the kind of sexism that e.g. Weinstein peddled.
Just because we call what a bigot or KKK member does racism and making a comment that touches on ethnicity or race "racism" doesn't mean those are the same things, or that both are bad.
You're of course entirely welcome to keep your speech pure, but know that there's a full grayscale here and we all have different tolerances.
I'm Irish and I don't really get it. The statement sounded pretty ignorant and typically American.
(I wonder if people will spot the irony).
My GF and I went to the beach about a month ago and took our dog.
The crows weren't frightened at ALL of our dog. They realized they could basically just 'float' up in the air when he came by using the breeze.
The fact that they were amazingly calm about it was really telling.
Second. We hid our stuff under a blanket. They realize it's still there as they have item persistence. So they lifted up the blanket, went into our bag, then started opening up everything.
They opened up lids. They went through my girlfriends purse. They took out all the items from her purse. They took the socks out of my shoes. They opened plastic containers.
They systematically went through all our belongings.
And BOY did they score. All our dogfood. All of our leftover lunch, etc.
And, damn, they're as good as human thieves at reading situations for opportunism.
http://www.josh.is/crow-machine/
Also, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think they would learn to insert a credit card into the machine given that they're good at manipulating sticks and stones and putting them into places.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWfVIjSdxTk
Its actually true they do this. Two noted ornithologist's describes it in one of their books on crows:
As ornithologist John M. Marzluff and author Tony Angell noted in their 2005 book In the Company of Crows and Ravens, the calls these birds use "vary regionally, like human dialects that can vary from valley to valley." And there's more: If a crow changes its social group, the bird will try to fit in by talking like the popular guys. "When crows join a new flock," Marzluff and Angell wrote, "they learn the flock's dialect by mimicking the calls of dominant flock members."
I realized that they are probably aware of my lack of attention to my food and that their in-built modeling of other agents had given them an advantage in this situation. I thought it was pretty impressive.
It was a big parking lot outside the gift shop, and some visitor had parked his motorcycle there. Pannier bags on the back.
The raven was sitting on one bag, actively working the zipper open. About a foot of zipper.
Which is pretty impressive, but the more impressive thing was how.
It would worry it for a couple seconds, tugging it a bit farther open, then stop, lift its head, and evaluate its surroundings.
If it didn't see anyone nearby, again with the zipper.
... I gained a new level of respect for corvids that day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfsnHVaScjg
Two of them held the "flap" open, and the third went in for fries. Once they'd made a decent pile on the ground outside the can, they all set in to feast.
Why do programmers talk about living beings in software terminology, it's so clinical and cold. Other species are sentient beings, but for many it helps combat cognitive bias by not thinking of them as such.
I've seen a one pull a closed brown lunch bag out of a freshly opened backpack, meaning the knew backpacks probably have food and brown bags are worth stealing and inspecting in detail elsewhere.
Clearly, gulls are the honey badger of the bird world!
They started a game of using McD's french fries as lures to get the beach gulls to swoop in on unsuspecting kids as they were playing... sometimes 20 or 30 gulls at a time.
Felt like dropping spotter rounds for airstrikes.
(No children were harmed, just many french fries tossed instead of consumed.)
Doorknobs are not ADA compliant any longer, but if you are on a private island with utah-raptors? knobs.
[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Kea
search for "seagull thief" videos.
Very smart but obnoxious in a way.
Just found this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y0xwX5iOFok
But I have seen a cat trotting along a wire fence with a concrete base. On that base, which was about the cat's height there was a hooded crow happily scuttering behind the cat and grabbing at its tail from time to time.
The cat mostly ignored it but it was apparent that it judges the chances of catching the pesky bird.
Dolphins (including orca) do, primates do, the article says crows do. Cats and dogs do too.
It never stops being funny to me
These are things not measured on intelligence tests and that don't fit well in to scientific experiments because they can't be "objectively" judged or quantified, but my intuition is that they do in fact have to do with intelligence -- just not the sort of intelligence that problem solving, planning, and tool use demonstrate. Though they may require problem solving, planning, or tool use to accomplish, there seems to be something else going on there.
I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams quote: "... on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons."
[1] - ...if such criteria could be applied to them -- we don't know, and that's part of the point. If we don't know how can we judge one animal who does one thing to be "smarter" than another who does something else?
[Citation Needed]
In other words, writing great poetry is a sign of intelligence, but not a requirement for intelligence.
Conversely, being good at problem solving, tool use, and planning might also be signs of intelligence, but maybe not requirements for intelligence either.
They would be considered less intelligent than humans that have developed speech, and later poetry and other refined forms of expression.
The same way humans that painted their caves are considered more intelligent than the humanoids that proceeded them, that weren't as able to express themselves.
Homo Erectus emerged 2 millions years ago, I'm not aware of anything that says speech couldn't have started during his reign.
Do you have any source for that 100,000 years figure?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/could-neandert...
> Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these features could have evolved for other reasons, like singing. Neanderthals may have lacked the cognitive abilities for language, but possessed the physical anatomy for musical calls to attract mates or sooth infants.
Seems to imply that speech was physically possible for neanderthals (and by extension, their common ancestor with homo sapiens), but there's no agreement among experts that it means that neanderthals did speak.
Because poetry had a more day to day use than that. The rhythm and the rhyming is a mnemonic device. It makes it much easier to remember a text than when spoken in prose.
I can't imagine even our early ancestors not making use of that. In fact the earliest literature was passed from generation to generation as an oral tradition.
Academics do, in fact, study recreation & play, language & song, and expressions of emotion like grief. They are considered indicators of some kind of intelligence worth studying. The book even devotes a chapter to each of those topics!
There are no Van Gogh's anymore just Pixar.
The problem of expressing yourself to a specific, deeper, degree than with mere talk? And/or (in olde times, when poems where meant to be accompanied by music/oration) creating something people can be entertained with and sing/dance too.
>Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem?
Yes. Mind you, it doesn't mean it's technical intelligence, the kind that solves math problems etc. It's intelligence with words, wordplay, expression, feelings, ways of seeing, etc.
Consider when someone common argues politics, but their first inclination is to fall back to statistics. They have now canceled out the component sum of all other elements in the set of understanding, only to rely on numbers as the indicator of truth.
Boethius once wrote about the 10 properties of man, one being number, and the others being place, position, attributes...etc. Yet, most of these are rarely used when you really get down to it.
Ezra Pound once made a statement that poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost.
And there really lies the connection I mean to give. Poetry is that which embraces Boethius' 10 properties including the numeric. Math in the most pure sense is focused only on quantity until it is applied to a context. (Physics, etc).
Language in itself is, discounting the vocal portions, a tool of symbolic manipulation. And from this one can generate a theory of linguistics, much like the Greeks, as that which binds symbols to images within a context, and the intended excitation of the senses.
Even math is explained and used as bound symbols within a context followed by a sort of kinesthetic sense.
Atop both of these, respectively, is grammar and the rules of mathematics.
Anyway, this is getting too long for a comment but this is my point.
- I think language and math are under a unified form of intelligence because the utilities used to perform them reach towards the same foundation.
- Poetry and writing is underappreciated not because it is technically inept, but for the reason that society has currently degraded it's understanding towards a single attribute (the numeric) and interprets anything that isn't a number as something which must originate from emotion.
- Emotion is hard to quantify so it is viewed as a isolated creative art that is not perceived as a criteria for what people mean when they think about intelligence.
- The author and the poet can and should be using their art with a technical foundation.
- Our current writers actually imply the state of society far greater than we think, which is ironic because they have the power to lead society.
- Intelligence tests as a metric imply an end result which is numeric. This is not a whole picture. Even if the number is representative of an abstract process used to indicate the success of solving a problem.
In other, other words, writing is viewed as a lesser art when it comes to quantifying intelligence because it is incompatible with such a motion in a world where the only viewpoint funnels into the numeric. It is also lesser because the quality of contemporary writing has a stark contrast to those works before us.
Object permanence.
How many things can they keep in working memory?
How many steps can they work through linearly to an objective?
How many dependent elements of a puzzle can be branched off for a single step?
Can they understand symbols as being representative of objects? Of verbs? Adjectives?
Can they understand counting, grouping?
Can they extrapolate solutions from one puzzle to another? How dissimilar can they appear for them to still recognize patterns?
Are they creative? Are they social?
There are things that other animals can do which humans can't, such as an octopus communicating with a grouper fish, two entirely different species, by changing the color and patterns of their skin, to corral and trap a prey (as seen on a segment of BBC's Blue Planet.)
Are humans "dumber" if we use that objective criteria to compare intelligence?
We have advanced communication with our domesticated animals, especially dogs. Also have some communication with non domesticated animals like primates, dolphins, etc..
Jackrabbits will be sitting safely in the grass on the side of the road, see you coming, watch until you're about to pass, have a panic attack, and sprint in front of your car just as you pass in order to "escape". I never slow down for crows. They know what they're doing. I slow down for my fellow mammals, jackrabbits, because they're nitwits. All I can say, looking at these birds and these rabbits, is: that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and took out the competition sure was a lucky break for us.
Except for the crows and the rooks. I keep an eye on them, and keep a foot poised for braking, but I never have to. They stroll, as you describe it, quite nonchalantly out the way, sometimes leaving a walnut for my vehicle to please crush. And here's the thing: They happily stroll into the opposite lane, if - and only if - no cars are approaching from the opposite direction. Complete grasp of the traffic situation, and they hardly ever fail - during the last year, I have seen one dead crow at the roadside; I'm gessing he took cool one step to far.
I've seen a bird of prey try to dive and swoop low over the land to evade them. They'll follow, some diving down low after it and some at a distance to keep an eye on it, until it's gone.
We basically have a crow air force keeping all the other birds and little mammals safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_(animal_behavior)#In_b...
They understand where the perfect number of cars is gonna be.
How did you learn arithmetic?
Others just dropped them from high altitudes. I suspect the ones on the power lines were just showing off; as much fun as need.
Prey animals are wary and startle easily to reduce their chance of becoming lunch.
Running in almost any direction is an effective means of escape.
Cars are much wider than most predators, meaning many directions end up being bad choices.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1334394/
Note: I generally do not advocate purposely messing with animals, but geese are evil! Also don't do this if there are young that might not be able to get out of the way in time.
Might have had some side effects though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_goose
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are these crows inventing the method over and over again independently, like scientists finding the same thing at the same time in different parts of the world? Is this some very basic instinct that the crows evolved into? Are they teaching each other and now the Euro crows using Japanise tech? Fascinating creatures.
On a semi-related note, magpies are also doing really well in that race. End of last year I started leaving oatmeal in a bottle cap on my terrace and every morning a magpie came to eat it every single day over the course of 2 months. And every evening when I came back home I had a handful of sticks, stones and berries left somewhere. No idea what I was supposed to do with them but thanks magpie I guess...
There may well have been multiple independent discoveries, and passing the skill on between individuals and generations has probably made it near-ubiquitous now.
We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.
Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.
That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.
tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.
If by "bring food to the table" you mean "earn a good salary at a very specialised job", maybe -- although 21 years is more like it.
But for literally bringing food to the table, basic survival skills, you're talking more like 8-10 years.
There can be a fair amount of complex behavior of groups. Ants and plants for example
http://web.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/26/the-intellige...
Skiing down a roof: https://youtu.be/1WupH8oyrAo
My girlfriend's spirit animal: https://youtu.be/Qt-pB1R64mI
Teaming up to provoke a catfight: https://youtu.be/WQd9kuXpUYU
Nipping a sausage: https://youtu.be/Y0xwX5iOFok
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/scientists-investiga...
http://www.thecrowbox.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Elephants are intelligent but not that much per the number of cells. Raccons are probably more intelligent than cats and have more neurons, ok. And why are Capybaras surprisingly high on the list?