Bird Brain Doesn't Have to Be an Insult

In the story “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a famous tale from Aesop’s collection of fables, the intelligence of crows is remarked upon as a thirsty crow drops pebbles into a pitcher with water at the bottom to raise the water and allow him to get a drink.

Illustration of “The Crow and the Pitcher”

Although not a very scientific anecdote, there has been tons of research done to support the supposed genius of crows. Also called Corvus brachyrhynchos, crows are members of the corvid family, which includes jays, ravens, and magpies. Crows have a brain that is about the size of a human thumb, but relative to their body size that is enormous.The brains of crows are not just different from the brains of humans in that they are smaller however. In fact, mammalian and bird brains share few structures from before their divergence over 300 million years ago. Despite these differences, the decision making cells in humans and crows are quite similar. The intelligence of crows may even point to convergent evolution between humans and crows. With the relatively large brain of crows, they have been known to be toolmakers, creating hooks by bending wires to reach inaccessible food. Additionally, multiple studies have proven that crows are able to recognize analogies, and direct their behavior according to what they have learned. One of the more interesting versions of these studies was led by John Marzluff and a team at University of Washington. The Marzluff study involved one person wearing a caveman mask on the Seattle campus of the University of Washington and taking some of the crows in the area hostage. After these visits by a caveman masked person, Marzluff and some of his researchers would show up to the same area with either no masks or unfamiliar Dick Cheney masks and there would be no response from the crows. If anyone returned to the location in a caveman mask however, the crows would go wild, attacking the person they perceived to have abducted some of their own.

The caveman mask that was used in Marzluff’s study

This experiment proved that crows are able to recognize the faces of individuals and associate them with certain events or emotions. In the same lane, there have been other experiments similar to the typical design which presents an animal with two choices, one choice leads to a reward and the other a punishment, that crows have been involved in. One such experiment presented crows with three cups turned upside down. The center cup had an image on it, and the two surrounding cups each had an image as well, one matched the center image and the other was different. The cup with the matching image had food underneath, and if the crows motioned to that cup with their beak they were rewarded with the food. The crows quickly picked up the lesson and repeatedly chose the matching cup, and they were also able to switch to picking the different image quickly if the researchers moved the food to the cup with the different image.


With this research in mind, being called a bird brain no longer has the same sting. The information may otherwise seem unrelated to our lives, but there are actually a few applications the knowledge about crows can have in Montclair. Crows have been spotted in our own Rand Park, and because they have such an acute sense of learning that is not always present in other animals it is possible that they have picked up some hints on survival from the behaviors of park goers. As some of the aforementioned studies indicate, crows are able to learn quickly from trial and error what choices will benefit them, and they have the memory to applies those lessons in the future. Among the unfortunate heaps of litter in the park, crows may have potentially discovered that if they look in certain types of containers left on the ground (or in the trash cans) there will be leftover food for them. A more solidified adaptation of birds that could affect how they interact with us while in Rand Park is their affinity to fly away from people who look directly at them, while ignoring people who walk past them with averted eyes. A habit developed from big city living, crows may prolong their stay in our park if they don’t feel threatened by any direct observation of them.

 

Crows often have a bad representation in the media, from their portrayal in the Hitchcock movie The Birds or even from the mention of their related corvid in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven.” Crows may be quite mischievous in their actions, as can be shown by a raven named Canuck stealing a knife from a crime scene in Vancouver, Canada, but they can also be friendly and warm. One great example of the friendly interactions possible to have with crows is the pattern of crows bringing little trinkets to a girl in Seattle, Washington who was feeding crows with the help of her mother in her backyard. So contrary to their scary portrayals, crows are majestic and intelligent creatures that make a great addition to Rand Park. There may even be some notable relationships developing between crows and Montclair High School students in the future.

If you want to know more about Marzluff's study of crows with masks then watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOkj7lJpeoc

This link also tells more about Marzluff and the trinket-leaving ravens: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-research-looks-into-crow-brains-intelligence/

Also, if you want to know about the raven who stole a knife from a crime scene click here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/crow-knife-crime-scene-1.3600299