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Who's the smartest corvid?

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Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#101

Post by pcrh »

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…

This might be what that article referred to [0]?

tl;dr, the higher cognitive abilities of birds are centered in a different region of the brain compared to mammals, the pallium vs the cortex. Neuron density in the bird pallium is also higher than the comparable density in the mammalian cortex.

[0] Developmental origins and evolution of pallial cell types and structures in birds https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adp5182

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#103

Post by rkuska »

I feed crows during winter in my local park. They recognize me as soon as I enter and follow me around. Some even fly very close above my head and tap me with a wing.

Also they cache food they don't eat, they hide it, cover with leaves and make sure nobody is watching them, they act very casual. I am not sure if they remember the locations though.

Compared to ravens they have smaller head but I believe it is because they spend so much time near people (at least here in Europe you don't see ravens in cities, they are afraid,for historical reasons, of people and low in numbers) they get smarter and more crafty.

I can recommend a great book about corvids with beautiful illustrations: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300122558/in-the-company...

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#105

Post by ragazzina »

fortran77 wrote: post #11
tejohnso wrote: post #6

Chasing a bird of lesser intelligence so that it slams into an office building window seems especially cruel.

Birds chase coyotes so they slam into the sides of cliff walls, sometimes even painting a fake tunnel to fool the coyote.

>Birds chase coyotes

Does the bird ever even acknowledges the coyote?

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#107

Post by r721 »

cubefox wrote: post #21

Here is one playing ball: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QqLU-o7N7Kw This one is feeding a dog: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q7Z0yZhyz0s Teasing an owl: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0i9tjnW7r0

I like this one:

>Crow skiing down a roof

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WupH8oyrAo

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#108

Post by tialaramex »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #77
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.

the evil here seems to be being a predator, which for the doe it would be reasonable to say the predator is evil, but examining the natural order of things from outside, as a human observing the doe, the fawn, and the crows, that is a pretty weird judgement to make. The predator has evolved to eat the prey, if that is evil then nature is evil or if you like, whatever created nature.

I suspect the corvids aren't obligate carnivores and so they could choose not to eat animals but they do it anyway.

Given that humans aren't obligate carnivores and further more, are capable of advanced chemistry so that even if they were obliged to eat other animals biologically they could just work around this without needing to kill anything - it seems much more compelling to judge us by such a metric than them. We decided that we liked steak so much we would deliberately raise cows just to eat them, the crow can't be anywhere near that "evil" if that's how we're characterising this outcome.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#109

Post by srean »

verisimi wrote: post #80
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the evil here seems to be being a predator, which for the doe it would be reasonable to say the predator is evil, but examining the natural order of things from outside, as a human observing the doe, the fawn, and the crows, that is a pretty weird judgement to make. The predator has evolved to eat the prey, if that is evil then nature is evil or if you like, whatever created nature.

'Evil' is a human characterisation, and is not applicable to animals imo; to apply it is to anthropomorphise the animal. An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.

We have rescue dog (abandoned on the street) and it seems to have a notion that violence within family is bad.

I was quite surprised to see that when I mock threatened my wife with a broom in his presence he jumped in to block. Not only that, he took the broom away from me and secured it away. I initially thought it was play, that he wanted to play with the broom. Seems he was just interested in separating me from the broom. He is our household saint.

We have a much younger dog (another rescue) who is not very nice at all to our saint. However, if my body language has even a hint of a threat to our little devil, he sure gets perked up and ready to protect.

This probably comes from pack behavior instinct. Fights inside a pack is bad.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#110

Post by srean »

Animats wrote: post #67
prerok wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The brains of corvids are not closely related to mammalian brains. All the mammals have roughly the same brain, but corvids have a different architecture.[1] Intelligence seems to have evolved three times on this planet - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. Octopuses have a distributed system rather than one central brain. They all have neurons, but the higher level architecture differs drastically. Knowing that several…

Octopuses are probably more alien than others.
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