Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 116 posts

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#91

Post by lexicality »

londons_explore wrote: post #80
dflock wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crows definitely get drunk, on purpose, by eating rotten fruit & berries, so this is plausible - although formic acid to the skin seems less fun - but then I'm not a crow.

Rotten fruit has a lot of calories in it... Perhaps they aren't intentionally getting drunk, but merely trying to get those calories and being drunk is a side effect? Being drunk as a bird wouldn't seem to be a good idea from a survival point of view ...

> Being drunk as a bird wouldn't seem to be a good idea from a survival point of view ...

Being drunk as a human is also not a good idea from a survival point of view given how often drunk people kill themselves doing stupid things.

Crows engage in play and form complex plans that show they understand that actions have consequences so it doesn't seem unreasonable that they might occasionally decide to get drunk and roll around on the floor screaming.

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#92

Post by INTPenis »

Grustaf wrote: post #82
INTPenis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schild means shield btw. I had a friend with a schild name and for the longest time pronounced it "child" without them correcting me. I felt so embarrassed when I realized it means shield.

That's how the ending is usually pronounced in English though. Consider how Americans say "Rothschild".

Yes but I'm swedish and should know better! :D

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#93

Post by Someone »

everly wrote: post #49
lioeters wrote: post #2

> [A]nting is..where birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin. > Some birds will sit still on an anthill and patiently allow the creatures to crawl freely through their feathers. At other times they have been seen to pick the ants up with their beaks and rub themselves with the tiny insects. > Sensing a threat, the ants shoot a spray of formic acid from their abdomens or anal glands which gets abso…

I’m inclined to think it’s akin to recreational drug usage in humans. Crows are supposedly more intelligent/aware than other animals, and with awareness comes existential dread or whatever you want to call it. Lots of humans use drugs to alleviate this and I think it’s plausible that crows do something similar. Hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a more uplifting reason.

FTA: “it was first observed in the 1830s when James Audubon noticed turkeys doing it.

[…]

The National Wild Turkey Federation says anting has been seen in more than 200 species of birds worldwide.”

Would be interesting to know whether all those >200 species are considered smarter than average birds.

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#94

Post by everly »

Someone wrote: post #93
everly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m inclined to think it’s akin to recreational drug usage in humans. Crows are supposedly more intelligent/aware than other animals, and with awareness comes existential dread or whatever you want to call it. Lots of humans use drugs to alleviate this and I think it’s plausible that crows do something similar. Hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a more uplifting reason.

FTA: “it was first observed in the 1830s when James Audubon noticed turkeys doing it. […] The National Wild Turkey Federation says anting has been seen in more than 200 species of birds worldwide.” Would be interesting to know whether all those >200 species are considered smarter than average birds.

Ah, thanks for pointing that out.

In that case, I’m inclined to think it serves one of the utilitarian functions that they mention, as it seems unlikely that all those species would have crow-level intelligence.

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#95

Post by grasshopperpurp »

rantwasp wrote: post #20
tpmx wrote: post #7

I live in a place where I get to witness epic battles between a murder of crows and a colony of seagulls on a daily basis this time of the year. The seagulls are nesting on the roofs of nearby houses. The crows are trying to eat the seagull hatchlings. It's kind of fascinating to watch. It seems like the crows are trying new strategies every new day. The much larger seagulls are wasting lots of energy in a kinda stup…

i got to witness a murder of crow harassing 2 bald eagles until the eagles just gave up and left. we’re not even talking a lot. There were maybe 6-7 crows. The theory I heard is the bald eagle(s) could easily take them on but they risk injury and the crows will try to mess them up. So the eagles just don’t risk it and move on + hunt things that don’t fight back (like rabbits). also, I can swear that crows taunt my do…

On a daily basis, I see mockingbirds chasing off crows. Sometimes they come out of a tree, so I assume those scenarios usually involve crows messing with nests. Other times mockingbirds will chase off crows as they're apparently passing through. Never seen a crow fight back, and they fly away (sometimes not far) as if they're saying, Alright, alright, I'm going. Typically, it's just a single mockingbird, so it's not as though the crow is being overwhelmed, but, like the eagle in your example, it's probably just not worth the energy/potential injury.

We have a lot of blue jays, too, and even though they're notoriously territorial, I can't remember seeing a blue jay/crow altercation. Maybe their reputation precedes them? I don't have any real guesses.

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#97

Post by mapkkk »

londons_explore wrote: post #80
dflock wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crows definitely get drunk, on purpose, by eating rotten fruit & berries, so this is plausible - although formic acid to the skin seems less fun - but then I'm not a crow.

Rotten fruit has a lot of calories in it... Perhaps they aren't intentionally getting drunk, but merely trying to get those calories and being drunk is a side effect? Being drunk as a bird wouldn't seem to be a good idea from a survival point of view ...

I’m on mobile so I can’t provide you with a good quality reply with sources, but we are taught in medical school that alcohol calories are not metabolized the same way as other nutrition.

In a very back of the envelope kind of way, here’s why: Alcohol is metabolized not as nutrition but as poison, and while yes, ethanol is very calorific, the calories derived from are lost (mostly) as heat. And, because of the metabolic pathways utilized, other important substances required by cells are depleted (products of the Pentose Phosphate Pathway - PPP) in the quest to detoxify alcohol. Running the PPP is generally an energy intense process, so you’re at a net loss when al said and done. This can partly help explain why chronic alcoholics are not overweight. This is excluding the calorie debt owed to repairing cell damage from the cytotoxic effects of alcohol.

If anyone’s interested, I can recommend some Biochemistry textbooks for a deep dive.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, partly thanks to the metabolic reasons, alcohol results in hypoglycemia, so it is unlikely that the bird would experience feelings of satiety after imbibing.

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#98

Post by meowface »

shadowythroaway wrote: post #72
optimalsolver wrote: post #17

>Dr. David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology with McGill University. Quite an appropriate name. Reminds me of the two most distinguished geologists of our day, Johnny Rockman and Bobby Boulders.

That's an Aptronym https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym

Is there a term for this kind of internet comment section correction? Like "it's an aptronym, not nominative determinism", or "it's an initialism, not an acronym".

(I'm not saying this to be snarky towards you or anything like that, and I personally appreciate seeing such corrections. Genuinely just curious if there's a term for this specific sort of thing, since it's common on HN and reddit.)

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#99

Post by meowface »

Grustaf wrote: post #82
INTPenis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schild means shield btw. I had a friend with a schild name and for the longest time pronounced it "child" without them correcting me. I felt so embarrassed when I realized it means shield.

That's how the ending is usually pronounced in English though. Consider how Americans say "Rothschild".

Rothschild means "red shield", for anyone curious.

The full etymology:

>The name is derived from the German zum rothen Schild (with the old spelling "th"), meaning "at the red shield", in reference to the house where the family lived for many generations (in those days houses were designated not by numbers but by signs displaying different symbols or colours).

Re: Photographer captures 'odd but exciting' crow behaviour known as anting

#100

Post by mikelevins »

strogonoff wrote: post #88
unwind wrote: post #81

That was weird. Also TIL that English of course has a specific word for a bunch of crows: a murder of crows [1]. As a non-native user of the language, that was ... surprising. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Crows

In English, collective nouns for a group of (usually animals) are full of surprises and often sound quite creative. A wake of vultures, a rave of ravens, a rookery of seals, and so on.

There's also a standard name for such nouns in aggregate; "terms of venery".

"Venery" in this context means hunting game animals, a usage that dates back to the late Middle Ages. Terms of venery are the conventional nouns used to designate collections of game animals.

They're colorful, as you already know. There are a bunch of them that we've inherited from the late Middle Ages.

On the other hand, there are a bunch more of them with more recent origin, presumably because amusement with the inherited ones has motivated lovers of words to coin new ones.

James Lipton wrote a book entitled An Exaltation of Larks collecting a lot of terms of venery, both ancient and modern. If you are amused by "a murder of crows" and "a parliament of owls" then you'd probably like the book.

Post reply on HN