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Who's the smartest corvid?

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Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#81

Post by karunamurti »

prerok wrote: post #12
JohnMakin wrote: post #3

One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something. It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the s…

I remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least…

Another case of brain efficiency : jumping spiders. They have less than half of ant's neurons, but instead of bruteforcing computing power they have a different specialized wirings.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#82

Post by chasd00 »

Once as a kid I was at my cousin’s ranch outside of Waxahachie Texas. I was sitting on the steps to his house eating a sandwich when a crow landed about 10 feet away and hopped right up to me. I gave it some of my sandwich and it just flew off. It was very strange, it didn’t seem to fear me at all and just wanted a bite. I told my aunt and she was shocked and not aware of any tame crows at all.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#83

Post by jamiek88 »

verisimi wrote: post #79
jamiek88 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment. Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.

> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? You think 'selfishness' and 'evil' are equivalent?

Matters of degree, no?

But that was poorly punctuated I meant selfishness or even evil not that they were equivalent.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#84

Post by e40 »

davidee wrote: post #49

We have a rather large number of Blue Jays that frequent our backyard. The smartest among them can weigh opportunity costs or count, or both. Most of the jays will take two peanuts in the shell, go crack the shell open (sounds like they're cracking eggs in the trees, hilarious), cache the nuts (technically the seeds of the legume but anyway nuts from herein for brevity) and then take another unshelled one and fly awa…

We have two types jays that visit us. Scrub and Stellar. They come into the kitchen (door off the deck) to stand and sort through the bowl of peanuts in the shell. It’s hilarious to watch them go through them, finding the heaviest (?) ones, tossing the rejects to and fro. They’re completely unafraid of us. They are a great joy to watch.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#85

Post by e40 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #3

One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something. It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the s…

I was talking with a neighbor once, and we had just started feeding the local crows. We were standing there for about 39 minutes, the I heard something metallic hit the sidewalk. I looked about 4 ft away, directly under the power lines, at a bottle cap. I hadn’t seen one of those in decades. Clearly it had been dropped by the crow perched up there.

Then, once we noticed a weird nut near the bowl of peanuts. Not sure what type it was, a buckeye I think.

Oddly, we’ve been feeding them for 6 years now and no other gifts!

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#86

Post by sherr »

drcongo wrote: post #31

Thanks to Merlin Bird ID, I've got rather into birds in the past few years. We have a robin and blackbird that hang out in the garden with us, seemingly unafraid. A couple of months back I bought a camera feeder [0] but we've still only had three bird types that visit - a coal tit who comes fairly infrequently but moves so fast the camera could easily be missing him, some amazing jackdaws who seem to take turns on th…

Yes, magpies are very intelligent birds. Also very annoying! I don't like hearing their "cackling", especially if you're in bed trying to sleep. Magpies at mine also figured out how to feed from the wire-cylinder hanging feeder, meant for small birds. They flap their wings like crazy to hover for a few moments at the feeder and knock out the food or get to it. Clever birds. The pigeons just stand around below and scavenge ...

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#87

Post by Nursie »

ggm wrote: post #71

Australian Magpies are NOT corvid but Artamidae along with the butcherbird, but they are absolutely this intelligent. They hold court over their juvelines and enforce behaviour, and they mourn the passing of members of the community. I think it's possible the niche encourages large brains. A bit of nature not nurture maybe. They are tool users. And they can teach offspring lessons learned from humans, and recognize f…

Love our magpies, we’ve been interacting with the local family for several years now and they trust us pretty well.

Last year during fledging season their baby was near the side of the road, in the grass looking lost/hurt/exhausted, so some kind but misguided passers-by (it’s normal, they kick ‘em out of the nest to try and make them fly) picked it up and were going to take it to a wildlife hospital. Mum was watching them from a tree, quite distressed.

I persuaded them I’d look after it and get help if needed, and took the baby back up to the house, then sat down outside and tried to give it back. Baby was by this point clutching my hand and nestling in to me. Mum wandered up, took a look at me holding her kid and I could almost imagine her saying “Ah, yeah you look after him for a while then, I need a break” because she seemed to relax, then went back to the other adults and had a feed before coming back for him!

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#88

Post by verisimi »

jamiek88 wrote: post #83
verisimi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? You think 'selfishness' and 'evil' are equivalent?

Matters of degree, no? But that was poorly punctuated I meant selfishness or even evil not that they were equivalent.

Thanks for clarifying.

Re matters of degree, I would disagree. The opposite of selfishness would be selflessness. This sounds like a good thing, eg being altruistic is assumed to be 'good', but then, it could also be about imposing one's values on someone, and devaluing the self. It could be a means of control (was forced altruism in communist countries 'good', for example). It seems that 'selflessness' - selfishness's opposite - can also be characterised as 'evil'. If it's not clear whether selfishness or selflessness is evil, it's not clear that it's a matter of degrees.

Ayn Rand argues in the "The Virtue of Selfishness" that selfishness is a good thing, if you want to see a lovely alternative argument.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3URpIKFoyW0

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#89

Post by dash2 »

helterskelter wrote: post #17
JohnMakin wrote: post #3

One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something. It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the s…

Crows in country will wait for a newborn deer to be left alone in a field by their mothers shortly after birth to peck the baby's eyes out so it dies and the crow can eat it later. My neighbor had told me about this happening, and maybe a month later I saw a fawn with its eyes pecked out shortly after it had died. The doe just sat at the edge of the field by it all night. So sad, but really smart of the crows. Crows…

I wonder how much of this is truly smart as in planned/intentional behaviour. Couldn’t it just evolve? Suppose you hang around something that you want to eat . And you make a lot of noise. So now predators show up. none of this was planned, but now you have a fitness advantage.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#90

Post by harrall »

jamiek88 wrote: post #64
kibwen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> smart but evil Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.

I glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment. Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.

I think evil is an an artificial and subjective construct and therefore intelligence will somehow do something “evil” by someone’s or something’s standard.

But at the same time, I think it is an important construct because it prevents groups from descending into absolute chaos, which encourages the survival of the species.

As a construct, I see the concept of evil as the way that humans classify activities that cause psychological harm and those triggers are somewhat biologically and culturally shared.

And there seem to be people that don’t seem to “see” evil (e.g. serial killers), but once again I think it’s just they don’t share some biological trait with the rest of us (which doesn’t justify their actions either).

So despite having the opinion that evil may just be a construct, I still find it important because (1) I am selfish and don’t want to be psychologically harmed and (2) I am not selfish and am vaguely interested in the survival of the species.

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