311–320 of 443 posts
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.
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I wonder if anyone’s ever done an experiment on the social connectivity of crows, by first somehow pissing off an entire flock of crows; and then tagging a particular individual crow, and repeatedly being friendly to/appeasing that crow, and seeing how long the it takes for the message that you’re not such a jerk after all to spread among the rest of the crow population.
> flock of crows This is called a murder of crows. I've always found that term odd, and it seems derogatory. I don't know the origin.
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What kind of structure would you build in the wild, if you'd never seen a house, or hut, or lean-to? Think you'd just arrive at these ideas on your own? Think you'd even consider building your own at all? Or would you just keep walking until you found a cave? We depend more on our collective intelligence and teachings than you think.
> What kind of structure would you build in the wild, if you'd never seen a house, or hut, or lean-to? For an instructive example-- a crow's nest of sticks, leaves, etc. Especially if that human comes up happens to come upon a crow's nest in the wild. Notice that the human can probably scale that design to fit their own larger stature. Now imagine a crow coming upon a little 1x1 dugout crawdad battle arena, or a litt…
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
Searching for the story just now, I came across this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/lawsuit-...
Apparently they were sued by neighbors for encouraging wild life or something.
What an odd pair of stories. One so uplifting; the other a downer from the opposite perspective. Zeitgeisty!
I remember this story from a few years ago: "the girl who gets gifts from birds" https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026 Searching for the story just now, I came across this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/lawsuit-... Apparently they were sued by neighbors for encouraging wild life or something. What an odd pair of stories. One so uplifting; the other a downer from the opposite perspective. Ze…
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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 the…
I sat and watched a raven (majestic and BIG, if you've never seen one) at Yellowstone Park for a few minutes. 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 co…
I am wondering where sulphur-crested cockatoo are on the scale. Before seeing some in freedom up close in Australia, I never realized they actually could grab objects with their claws like they are hands and put them in their mouth. They seemed very smart to me. I wonder if they lose to crow only because they are less prevalent around most labs in the world...
Parrots get mentioned all the time in animal intelligence research. Normally the experiments take different forms: you keep one parrot in captivity and teach it to speak, while you observe the behaviour of groups of crows in the wild.
https://www.amazon.com/Kea-Bird-Paradox-Evolution-Behavior/d...
When I was a child, I'd spend a lot of time at my grandfathers farm, and one summer he took in an injured crow that hurt its wing. For some strange reason, he named all of his animals Jack, cats, dogs and now crows. So we'd go out in the morning and my grandfather would call out "Jack" and the Dog would come running down the yard, and then next thing you'd see the crow hopping down the yard after the dog. It would ar…