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Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

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Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#311

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Almost sounds like making offerings to a friendly god. How curious!

So am I am the god then ? hahaha Well, from a "devout" atheist, you tickled my funny bone :)

Ah, I am not so sure, crows consider humans gods. They kind of lack respect for that ..

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#312
>“Besides crows, this kind of neurobiological evidence for sensory consciousness only exists in humans and macaque monkeys.”

Well, the fact that animals can remember things for more than a second or two is pretty good evidence that they have this kind of sensory consciousness. The ability to say you saw something and the ability to act on having seen something seem to be intimately tied together in every case we can probe. We only seem to be influenced by subliminal stimuli for a second or two, for instance. And there are people whose vision systems are cut off from their consciousness, they can pick up objects in front of them but not say that there's an object in front of them. A normal person can close their eyes then remember where an object was and pick it up. They can't.

So you would tend to expect this in any animal capable of remembering things.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#313
post #159

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Can you heal a shattered leg all by yourself with no one around? I guarantee you’ll lay on the ground until nightfall and probably be eaten by coyotes (since you’re a human, they /might/ leave you alone). If you have someone with you, maybe they can carry you. Crows can’t carry other crows. If they wanted to fix the other crow, they’d have to do it where the crow fell. It would still get eaten by coyotes. They can’t…

Why crows haven't invented stretchers to carry fellow crows to safety? Making a stretcher doesn't look more complicated than building a nest.

A crow can carry about 1.5 lbs in flight. A crow weighs at most 4.5 lbs. Let's assume a stretcher that can carry a crow by more than one crow to weigh another 1-2 lbs. At most, the total payload would be ~5 lbs which requires at least 4 crows. I don't think that kind of coordination is possible with that kind of turbulence in such close quarters.

So why bother?

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#314

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I thought it was a badge, but then realised it had spikes. Unfortunately the unwanted guest in my Porcupine Tree fought back, and being that this happened on the 14th of February is how I ended up calling this My Bloody Valentine.

When all else fails, there is always a Bullet for My Valentine, luckily it was February, if it was Novembers Doom you would have been in for a Life of Agony with the only way out being a Five Finger Death Punch inside A Perfect Circle. That would have been the Story Of The Year.

S L A Y E R!

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#315

Hopefully someone in the field will read this and be able to answer my question: I've spent a lot of time googling research about animal intelligence, and I now know a bunch of things intelligent animals can do, but I have no idea where their limits are, what they can't do. Everything published uses such... nonflexible tasks. If we're trying to measure general intelligence, why isn't anybody trying to teach corvids,…

Well, we can teach animals vocabulary but I'm not aware of any success in teaching grammar where "eat banana" and "banana eat" convey different concepts. People have been trying for a long time without any success that I'm aware of in birds or other primates. What the limits are is very much an area of active research.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crows and other birds are very good at recognizing faces so they absolutely know it's you

Can they recognize person? I highly doubt it because even humans, we are very good recognizing faces, still not very good recognizing faces from another race. I know birds can recognize themselves, from feather patterns and so on. I would think the way they see us would be similar to the way we see them, they probably look the same to us.

Crows recognize individual humans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/science/26crow.html

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#317

My crow story, which I think I've mentioned on here before. We have young children, and thus the back of our car is always a little disgusting with things like goldfish crackers littered all over the floor and in-between the cracks of their car seats. We got in the habit of throwing the crumbs out onto the driveway when we got home. It didn't take long for us to notice anytime we pulled in, the crows would be lined u…

Crows, being social animals, have a concept of friend already. They also have a concept of foe. Crows are well-documented to wage war against red hawks (buzzards across the pond), and this goes further than just bickering over a tasty bit of carrion: they will actively gang up on red hawks whenever they see them. Which is risky business, red hawks being larger, with sharper beaks and talons. It's pretty neat that the…

A couple days ago I was sitting on my porch and heard an awful racket nearby, some crows were screaming and I didn't know why, until I saw the hawk sitting in the tallest tree around. They didn't let up for hours until it left.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#318
post #243
post #236

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I'm so blown away by the clarity of speech! After hearing him talk like that, hearing the normal bird noises almost sounds strange, like a human mimicking a bird, or like he's gotten impatient and wants us to understand his native language.

If you haven't watched it already, you should check out 'Dancing With The Birds' on Netflix. Maybe I'm biased being a huge bird lover, but man that movie left me in awe. This scene in particular... https://youtu.be/Eg0iSIHIK34

On a slight tangent, but is it just me or is this video weirdly HD for 1080p on Youtube? It's incredibly crisp

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#319
post #276

One thing that is remarkable about crows is that they are most likely more intelligent than primates, despite having a much smaller brain. It looks like they evolved high intelligence separately, using different brain circuitry from ours.

Imagine what could happen if you scaled up the space efficient crow brain to human size.

It's really sort of weird that a mammal ended up becoming Earth's first technological species. Birds all have the good neuron scaling that in mammals mostly only primates have. They have high energy intensity lifestyles where the extra energy cost of a big brain isn't a insuperable obstacle as with our pursuit hunter ancestors but not most other mammal lifestyles. Also they've got unidirectional rather than tidal lungs which might not be important for intelligence but is really cool. Without the end-Cretaceous meteor we'd probably have had intelligent dinosaurs a long time ago.

Re: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

#320

I have a personal experience story regarding crows. This is completely anecdotal of course but, to me, compelling. I live on an island near Seattle, very quiet and rural. We have a lot of wild life. One morning I was woke by persistent crowing by... well crows. Black Crows (not the band). Having been awoke from wonderful REM sleep I was understandably annoyed. So I went out to the street in front of my house and grab…

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