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How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

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Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#51

Post by rags2riches »

username223 wrote: post #44
hirundo wrote: post #32

Have you ever exchanged a look with a stranger and their expression was such that you immediately got a deep impression of their inner life, of their humanity, and felt a connection? That happened to me with a raven, while we were both enjoying a stunning view of a sunset at Petrified Forest National Park. It was a large, old, rumpled, wise seeming creature. Surely that environment primed me for the experience. The m…

For me, it was watching them play for hours outside the office. Sometimes a pair would fly together for awhile, then one would dive at the other, who would flip over at the last instant. There was no reason for them to do this; they just had enough free time to screw around.

That's a sure sign you are watching ravens, not crows. Ravens can play together in the air in ways crows never do.

Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#52

Post by rags2riches »

cgriswald wrote: post #45
rags2riches wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Swedish, the names are Korp and Kråka. The birds obviously know this and take every chance to introduce themselves.

> In Swedish, the names are Korp and Kråka. Strange. I would have guessed Huginn and Muninn.

Hugin and Munin means Thought and Memory. I can't imagine how that would be onomatopoeia :)

Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#53

Post by esilver »

nyolfen wrote: post #48
tedmcory77 wrote: post #47

At the Grand Canyon National Park they told us that ravens are the only animal allowed at wolf kills; this is because they train wolf pups while the parents are off hunting so theyre recognized.

what do you mean by train wolf pups?

My guess would be that the ravens demonstrate effective scavenging behavior to the wolf pups. Interestingly, both wolves and ravens engage in observational learning of food acquisition behaviors [0].

I think most of us would assume that wolf pups have an innate scavenging ability; this is probably wrong.

[0] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/aff0/dca479ca58868890d903cd...

Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#54

Post by mongol »

In Northern Europe, the subspecies Corvus cornix, hooded crow, is easy to tell apart from the raven due to its grey body parts. For this reason there is never any doubt what you see, but this also has imprinted the other body differences in my mind. I don't think it is hard to tell the black Corvus corone from raven due to this.

Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#56

Post by jjgreen »

French crows are bigger than English crows, and behave rather differently. An English crow on a pavement will hop out of the way of an approaching pedestrian, a French crow will stand there and look at you, as if to say "Yeah, do you want some?"

Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#58

Post by djmips »

ZhuanXia wrote: post #40
hirundo wrote: post #32

Have you ever exchanged a look with a stranger and their expression was such that you immediately got a deep impression of their inner life, of their humanity, and felt a connection? That happened to me with a raven, while we were both enjoying a stunning view of a sunset at Petrified Forest National Park. It was a large, old, rumpled, wise seeming creature. Surely that environment primed me for the experience. The m…

Scott Alexander has a good post on bird intelligence here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligen... Though they have much smaller brains, there is evidence to suggest that their brains are 10x more computationally dense.

Birds are on a better process.

Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#59

Post by osrec »

reaperducer wrote: post #19

Crazy to see this posted today. Last night my wife and I were on a reservation in Arizona and watching the birds. She googled this very topic. Then when I looked at HN today, here it is! I showed it to her and the first thing out of her mouth was, “Is Facebook listening to me?” Then I had to explain that HN is human-powered and the chances of Big G and Facebook and HN sharing data is pretty close to zero.

Similar spooky things happen to me with online adverts. I happened to mention to a friend that I want to adopt a dog. Lo and behold, for the next 5 days, all I see is dog adoption/dog food adverts. It's happened twice to me, and both times, the ads have been so out of the ordinary from my usual ads, that I actually took time to notice them!

I'm fairly certain Google is listening in to conversations for ad targeting. I think your case is serendipity!

Re: How to tell a raven from a crow (2012)

#60

Post by hopler »

ZhuanXia wrote: post #40
hirundo wrote: post #32

Have you ever exchanged a look with a stranger and their expression was such that you immediately got a deep impression of their inner life, of their humanity, and felt a connection? That happened to me with a raven, while we were both enjoying a stunning view of a sunset at Petrified Forest National Park. It was a large, old, rumpled, wise seeming creature. Surely that environment primed me for the experience. The m…

Scott Alexander has a good post on bird intelligence here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligen... Though they have much smaller brains, there is evidence to suggest that their brains are 10x more computationally dense.

To some extent brain "power" goes with surface area, right? Granted the surface is highly folded in 3 dimensions. But I think larger brains have a lot more "non thinking" matter to support the complexity of maintaining a larger neural network. On the other hand, effective thinking-power may be superlinear in neuron count. Or perhaps sublinear.
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