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A girl who gets gifts from birds

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Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#101

There's an old 4Chan thread where a user starts 'World War Crow' by favoring a certain group of crows over another. Allegedly, after some time, the two groups of crows have an all out battle over which group gets french fries. http://usvsth3m.com/post/69700674556/has-an-anonymous-4chan-...

Yeah, you have to be careful to share the goods evenly among corvids. If you favor one individual, it can be exiled, or even attacked and killed by the others. A crow that is good at getting your attention rises in status if you make sure that there is enough to go around for the group.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#102

I had a pet crow when I was about 6 years old - he was a fledgeling who'd left his nest on the hottest day of the year and was dehydrated. My brother and I were squirting eachother with water and he cawed at us until we squirted him. He decided this was the best thing ever, and basically adopted us from then onwards. He was the terror of the local cats and dogs, but left our two siamese alone because he knew they wer…

Similar story, ~10 years ago a friend's dad (a hunter) found this crow alone and starving (he was probably 1 month old). He gave it to me. I feed him for 1/2 months and instead to leave him in a cage I decided to let him living outside... free.

He was super smart, he was able to recognize me he was playful but the thing that most surprised me was that he was really lovable he really liked to be petted and every time I was on my way home from school he would fly down on my shoulder and start to rub my cheeks happy to see me like a dog would.

Like a dog every time I called him within a minute or so he would fly down on my shoulder or arm everywhere from my small town. It was a powerful sensation!

One day that didn't happen. Indeed I was deeply sad. I thought he died ceasing cats or rats.

Around a month later I was driving home while from the windows of my car I started to see several crows flying very close to my car.

I stopped the car when suddenly something like 15/20 crows landed in front of me.

I'm not good in recognize crows especially at night but I suspect my crow found his crew and wanted to let me know he was fine. Maybe a proper goodbye?

I went home with a huge smile, I was a lover of birds, I had several of them, within years I totally stopped to buy them because I think a bird should be free to fly.

Crows are awesome.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#103
post #45

Whenever someone asserts that mammalian-equivalent intelligence is incredibly unlikely to arise twice, I like to point towards very intelligent and social birds, like crows - who are capable of performing advanced mental feats without a neocortex .

Avian neuroscience is actually pretty cool. Our neocortex is made up of 6 layers of cell bodies, with interconnections and projections to other parts of the brain and body. The avian brain, however, is not divided into layers, but is more like the brainstem, in the sense that it's a lot of nuclei and bulbous areas called the nidopallium and mesopallium. The songbirds are well studied, if you want to do some research, as we the vocalizations are easier to measure and mess with. Mind that crows, though very smart for birds, as still nowhere near us humans or our close friends, the dog or pig. It still seems that the neocortex and many other factors have beaten the corvid brain to civilization and are, at least in this environment, better suited for higher intelligence.

Good starter articles on corvid intelligence are:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626540/

http://academic.reed.edu/biology/professors/srenn/pages/teac...

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#104
I pissed off crows and they punished me for 2 weeks.

My uncivilized hooligan former neighbors had a young tree in their yard which they purposely allowed to grow for years right in the foundation of our brick wall. It started casting a shadow in our garden as well. There were no nests in the 20 foot young tree and the property was abandoned and now owned by the bank. So I ran over and cut it down. It was big enough to start cracking the foundation.

Big mistake, I should have worn a disguise. The crows who live in the tree above the one I cut took saw this as vandalism (well it technically was). For 2 weeks they would poop on my car non-stop. Only my car. They knew the PT Cruiser was mine, they shat all over that car. They specifically aimed for the door handle on the driver's side. I have never seen such vengeful birds and such nasty bird crap. It was discussing. They'd carpet bomb it all day, every day, for 2 weeks. I would have about 14 bird crap splatters on the car on any given day. They finally stopped after about 2 weeks.

I should have had a neighbor do it or worn a disguise.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does TED fits in all of this?

A TED talk about this project helped popularize this particular example of crow intelligence. http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of...

Darn it... I just watched that the other day and was truly amazed.

It was all lies, then? Or mostly lies?

I told myself a year or two ago that I was going to stop watching TED talks because of their misinformation problems, and this was the first one I had watched since. Fool me once...

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#106
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confused... you're saying that the crow in the video is not playing with the object? What other interpretation is there? It's not an instinctual nest building activity to go sledding on a foreign object, is it? I'm a Gen-Xer, and I think that crow is sledding for fun.

If you look closely its trying to pick at something that it finds curious. Sledding could possibly be an accidental outcome of it being sitting on a thin edge, not the original purpose.

It could have been an accidental outcome the first time. But when the crow then picks up the disc and flies back up to the peak, fails to get any distance on an area with no snow, flies over to a snowy section, and sleds again...

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#107

I pissed off crows and they punished me for 2 weeks. My uncivilized hooligan former neighbors had a young tree in their yard which they purposely allowed to grow for years right in the foundation of our brick wall. It started casting a shadow in our garden as well. There were no nests in the 20 foot young tree and the property was abandoned and now owned by the bank. So I ran over and cut it down. It was big enough t…

Looks like the crows' intelligence can go both ways! I suspect that your disguise would not have fooled them though. I've watched some amazing feats of Crow problem solving (thanks Sir David Attenborough!) so they probably would have just watched which house you went into and carpet bombed ALL the cars in the driveway.

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#108
post #4

There already exists an automated exploit for this behavior: Joshua Klein's Crow Machine: https://www.josh.is/crow-machine/ see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470840

Paying crows peanuts to 'find' money has to be the best business plan ever. This could be bigger than Apple.

Crowsourcing!

Re: A girl who gets gifts from birds

#109

There's an old 4Chan thread where a user starts 'World War Crow' by favoring a certain group of crows over another. Allegedly, after some time, the two groups of crows have an all out battle over which group gets french fries. http://usvsth3m.com/post/69700674556/has-an-anonymous-4chan-...

Maybe some group of aliens distributed oil and other valuable minerals unevenly across the Earth, and now they're watching and laughing and running betting pools.
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