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When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

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Re: When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

#181

Post by QuotedForTruth »

Unklejoe wrote: post #132
krzrak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize you're not supposed to toss around garbage in the national 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…

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.

http://www.yellowstonepark.com/yellowstone-bears-no-longer-g...

Re: When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

#182

Post by mod »

logfromblammo wrote: post #178
Unklejoe wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, yo…

Do you realize that plums and peaches and apples are all likely to be happy just to be carried off and dropped?

You don't have to eat freaking pits out of fruit.

Re: When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

#183

Post by RaleyField »

guptaneil wrote: post #158
glasz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

surely the crowd would have calmed down if you buried the poor pal. but instead you threw it into the trash can. come on...

Burying our dead is a primarily western culture tradition. Many other cultures prefer cremation for example. Why would the birds care how you dispose of the body? It's possible the birds knew OP wasn't the killer and were hoping to intimidate them into leaving the body alone in hopes of catching the real killer, but that's just a guess.

> It's possible the birds knew OP wasn't the killer and were hoping to intimidate them into leaving the body alone in hopes of catching the real killer,

Or the birds remembered the real killer of their fellow crow but then OP showed up and so therefore, ipso facto, he must've killed the crow but they couldn't know both couldn't kill the crow because they are birds so shriek.

Re: When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

#184

Post by Gracana »

SEJeff wrote: post #164
kamaal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>They went so berserk that I thought for sure they would swoop down and peck at me like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", but they didn't. You got lucky. Here in India, crows get electrified all the time and if you try to clean up a good set of crows will peck on you. And trust me I've been pecked once and it hurts real bad, some times it rough enough to make a person bleed.

Would it be unreasonable to go at them with a cricket bat if they dive bomb you? Not out of aggression, but self defense.

That doesn't sound anything like self defense.

Re: When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

#186

Post by logfromblammo »

thedoctor79 wrote: post #148
carapace wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Subjectivel…

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 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.

Re: When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

#188

Post by safeignorance »

chrisseaton wrote: post #161
goda90 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a wilderness survival course in college that included multiple days in the wilderness for the final. In over 40 years there had only been two deaths. One was dehydration due to a stupid fad diet and the other was hantavirus. It looks like the flu until it's too late. So if you are around mice droppings and get flu like symptoms soon after, get to a doctor soon.

> I took a wilderness survival course in college That's interesting - do you mean as a part of a social club, or actual scholarly study of survival techniques? Or maybe to support a major in something like archeology? Or maybe a military college?

It's not terribly uncommon for colleges to require some form of physical education like in high school. The motivations are varied -- from legal mandate (for state schools) all the way to subsidizing the athletic staff with tuition dollars for BS courses.

And even where there aren't strict requirements, students sometimes end up with a few extra "free" course credits (e.g. to stay full time for a final semester). Uni staff/faculty are often willing to teach a course like this because it's fun and they get a couple grand for teaching young people about their hobby for an hour every week.

FWIW I took a rock climbing course like this (last semester, had a few extra credits my scholarship paid for in any case, and didn't have time for a real course due to travel). There was just enough "scholarly study" to make the course barely legit (read 2 books and discussed safety techniques in a science-y way), but 99.9% of the time was spent climbing.

Re: When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

#189

Post by resolaibohp »

SiVal wrote: post #124

A VERY timely article for me. About a month ago here in Silicon Valley, I noticed that a crow had been violently torn apart and the pieces scattered all over my backyard lawn. I assume the killer was a raccoon--another improbably intelligent animal. How those fat, little ninjas do what they do is beyond me, but one had apparently caught a crow. A few hours after I noticed the carnage, I grabbed a paper grocery bag an…

You are right, they are very interesting in their displays of intelligence. One time when I was hunting, there were a group of crows near my camp site. They would come down and investigate where I was staying looking for any scraps of food. As soon as my gun was visible they would all fly several hundred yards away and observe me from a safe distance. Once I put my gun away they would all return back to my camp site to look around.

It was very clear they knew exactly what the gun was, and knew to stay clear of it when they saw it. I never thought about crows the same after that.

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