like seriously their brain-to-body size ratio is equal to that of a chimpanzee
They vocalize anger, sadness, or happiness in response to things
they are scary smart at solving puzzles
some ravens stay with their mates until one of them dies
they can remember faces
SIDENOTE HERE BECAUSE HOLY SHIT. They did an experiment where these guys wore masks and some of them fucked with crows. Pretty soon the crows recognized the masks = douchebag. But the nice guys with masks they left alone. THEN, OH WE’RE NOT DONE, NO SIR crows that WEREN’T EVEN IN THE EXPERIMENT AND NEVER SAW THE MASK BEFORE knew about mask-dudes and attacked them on sight. THEY PASSED ON THE FUCKING INFORMATION TO THEIR CROW BUDDIES.
They remember places where crows were killed by farmers and change their migration patterns.
YEAH! THEY ALSO PLAY FOR NO EVIDENT REASON OTHER THAN FUN AND THEY LOVE THE SNOW! Crows are seriously the coolest birbs ever.
To think a lot of people hates them *sigh* because they’re black and caw. Crows are like black cats, I’d love to see two play together.
I love crows
Crows are lovely 🙂
They are such clever and adorable birbs
CAW CAW ♥
Thanks for the lead in to what is possibly my most favouritest fun fact ever =)
Crows are not alone in their shocking avian intelligence. The whole Corvidae family is eerily smart. And a bit odd.
People throughout history have picked up on this, leading to them having the BEST group names in the animal kingdom. A Parliament of Rooks. An Unkindness (Or Conspiracy) of Ravens. And of course, A Murder of crows.
Each breed has it’s own quirks, and their intelligence takes different specific forms.
There’s Magpie’s, who will collect shiny things. Often specifically stealing things they know other creatures want (Car keys, Jewelry), leading to nests that are veritable treasure troves.
Crows are not just capable of using tools, they will Make them. And are among the smartest creatures on the planet. Right up there with Primates and Dolphins.
And my personal favourite. The utterly entrancing Rook. We don’t have them in North America, but they are very common in Europe and Asia. They are just as smart as crows, but slightly smaller. They exhibit the same tool usage and making, and even abstract reasoning.
Get this… Scientists like to observe them a lot, to study how smart they are, so they construct strange situations where food is out of reach, but detectable. In this one test, they put a worm in a tube of water, on top of which it floated. The rook couldn’t reach the worm of course, and they figured it might make a tool to reach. It did, sort of… It picked up rocks, and one by one tossed them into the tube. Raising the water level, and the worm, until it was within reach O_o.
It understood Water Displacement. A bird that CAN’T SWIM, and can’t really directly interact with water other than to drink it, somehow understood Water Displacement!
The only reasonable explanations seem to be either A) It observed people doing similar things, and extrapolated that knowledge and applied it to it’s situation. Or B) … It had been dropping pebbles into liquid before, just to see what happened, and figured it out on its own.
That’s literally science. A damn bird was capable of scientific reasoning. I know tons of Humans that aren’t capable of that. That bird is smarter than possibly the Majority of humans. Or at least a significant Minority.
But that’s not why I’m such a fan. No. I’m a fan because they exhibit what might possibly be the strangest, most unexplained behavior I’ve ever heard of by Anything.
Now, I do have to say this should be taken with a grain of salt, as it’s pretty fantastic, and hasn’t to my knowledge been recorded or observed in good conditions, but there Have been a number of independent reports of people seeing it happen… There, disclaimer over.
It’s well established that Corvidae commit murder. This part is well verified. Various members of the species will occasionally assault and kill each other for reasons no one can explain. We assume there’s some kind of social reason, since they develop pet names for each other, language, have long memories and harbor grudges, we assume they can also hate. Enough to kill each other.
It could also parenthetically be noted that while some people might claim “Animals don’t go to war”, or murder, etc, etc. That’s demonstrably untrue. Stupid animals don’t go to war. Intelligent ones do all the time. Apes, Dolphins, and presumably Crows.
But… That still leaves out the strange phenomenon of the Parliament, or as it was first called, the Storytelling.
Sometimes, very rarely. A gathering of Rooks will occur, as they often do. Except on these rare evenings, always late at night, they gather around one individual. That individual stands in the center of a ring of it’s brethren, and talks. Or rather, chirps and squawks. At length. With emphasis, repetition, movement… Drama.
And then, after some length of time, it stops. And the circle stands silent for a moment. Then at some unseen signal, one of two things happens. Either they all fly away, followed soon after by the bird in the middle. Or…
They Attack, and mercilessly rip it apart.
There’s a number of ideas on why this might happen. Perhaps it’s a Trial. After all, they can murder, they can resent. Maybe they can have a sense of justice? Maybe they punish those who harm the flock somehow?
I don’t really know. But I do know that the crows where I went to college enjoyed terrifying people. I’m dead serious. There was a stand of huge trees north of campus. Trees that at dusk in the spring and fall, would FILL with crows. I mean FILL. Thousands of them. Maybe even tens of thousands. Nearly every night. I have no idea why they liked those trees so much.
But for whatever reason they did. And they would take laps in small groups. As if they were on patrol or something. Twenty or so at a time. They’d loop around for a few minutes, then settle, and another group would take their place.
And if you were walking alone to your car, just before dark, that group would come to say hi. They’d fly down and land. All around you. And sort of hop along, sneaking up on you from behind. Whichever bird you turned away from, it would sneak closer. Until you had this ring of birds circling tight around you. And then all at once they’d explode into the air in this huge rush of beating wings, and head back to the tree cawing their asses off.
God help the poor bastard I saw throw a rock at them.
There was this silence for like… probably 3 seconds, but it felt like longer. Then the group near him screeched, awful shrill caws. And took off… And so did like, every other damn crow within ear shot. Thousands of them.
The guys face just went white, and he bolted for his car. He made it fine, it wasn’t far. But a bunch of them landed. Scratched it all to hell. Pecked at the roof. Then got bored and all took a big shit on it.
(Some of you who have read a great deal might be now thinking about the Parliament of rooks, “Hold up, that’s from a book. It’s fiction” , Yes, it is, Neil Gaiman. But while someone Might have made it up, it wasn’t him. He got it from stories he heard when he was younger, and there are a number of written accounts going back for some time of people claiming to have seen this. It’s entirely possible that this is just a good story that has been repeated over the years. And gained more notoriety since it’s publication by a best selling author. But the fact does remain that Corvidae Do murder each other. Often in groups. That much we know, and has often been observed and even recorded. They do gather in these social circles for unexplained and unknown purposes. So really, the only thing in doubt is the strange organization. Which they have proven very capable of. The only real question is, does it happen exactly like this… And well. The damn things are smart enough to figure out the rudiments of science. People had laws WAY before they had science. So it seems a perfectly reasonable leap to me)
*** PS – Edit *** I wrote this around 1am Thursday night (which I will blame for it’s incoherence), but didn’t post it. Figuring I’d schedule it for the weekend since I didn’t have a new image to go up.
Friday morning there were four crows lined up on my fence staring at me. They didn’t even fly away when I walked past them. They just turned their heads and watched me, making quiet little caw’s to each other. I haven’t seen a crow in months. I thought they had fled for somewhere less drought stricken. I think the meaning is clear… The crows have learned to hack my tumblr account They know I’m on to them!
@memnus
My grandpa had a magpie as a pet and he taught it how to speak.
I have a couple of corvidae stories. (Corvidae – bird group that contains crows, etc).
1. I was hiking in Greece with my dad, as a teenager. We were heading up this trail. There was a fence and a gate at kind of the end of town and on the other side was open alpine pasture.
We walked through the gate and immediately got buzzed by a raven. Only one raven, but it was buzzing us repeatedly, turning around, doing another pass, etc.
Me and my dad looked at each other. We looked around for a second raven – wondering if we’d somehow gotten too close to a nest. Nope. No nest. No other raven.
So, we turned back.
Not five minutes later…about when we would have reached the top of the ridge and been the highest objects in the area, the heavens opened with a completely out of the blue thunderstorm.
I’m convinced to this day that the raven could see the storm coming, realized the Stupid Wingless Humans were walking right into it, and was actually trying to warn us off. This wasn’t some little storm that would just make you wet. This was some pretty seriously dangerous weather.
2. Me and my husband were hiking across a hill in Snowdonia, arguing about which of the rocks around us was the summit.
A crow flew past us, circled, flew past us again, then did a freaking aileron roll as it flew past.
Not a barrel roll. An actual closed wings and tumble aileron roll. I didn’t even know birds could do that.
There were no other crows around.
The only possible motivation was that the crow was showing off.
To us.
Crows and their kin have the same brain to body ratio as the great apes and are at least as intelligent.
But, of course, the dinosaurs are all extinct and dead end failures. Right?
Dad kept hiding pine nuts in the pages of this magazine and letting Edgar root around for them.
(Edgar cannot be released to the wild due to an injury. He now works as an ambassador bird and general household nuisance.)
Edgar has added to his vocalizations since I last saw him! He used to only say “oh wow” in a really sarcastic voice and to mimic the trill of a screech owl. Now he also screams “WHAT?!” and mumbles “what a WHOPPER!”
It was hysterically funny discussing politics with him in the room. We’d mention some new scandal and he’d randomly interject with cries of astonishment.
Please let Edgar know that I love him
Edgar has graced my dash twice today and I learned something new each time. I too love him.
I love everything about this, most of all the fact that you named him Edgar because it makes me think of Poe’s “The Raven” immediately
His full name is Edgar Allen Crow.
I don’t know if I added this video to this post but here are some of Edgar’s vocalizations:
Edgar isn’t a pet, he’s an educational “ambassador bird” who lives as a rehab center with licensed professionals due to a permanent foot injury that prevents him from being released to the wild.
A CROW TRIED TO GO IN OUR CLASSROOM AND HE HAD A PEN
yes hello i am here to learn geometries
That crow is more prepared than some of my students.
You’ve all just like, completely skipped over the possibility that this crow has seen people using pens in this room, found one, and is trying to return it. There’s been videos of crows picking up sweet wrappers and stuff and placing them in bins after seeing humans put their litter in bins. I really do believe that this crow is trying to return the pen and that is ADORABLE AS HELL.
THEY ARE SO SMART I LOVE THEM
Crows are thought to be self aware by some scientists. Its perfectly possible the crow wants to return the pen to humans. Knowing it belongs to humans.
Corvids. Who KNOWS. 🙂
Another cool crow deal: Once, when trying to assess if crows could reason and use tools, scientists had two crows who didn’t know each other each take a wire from a table (one was hooked, one was straight) and try to grab meat from a bottle with it. The crows could see each other, though they had separate bottles. Only the straight wire worked for this, so they hypothesized that if crows could reason, the second trial would have the two crows fighting over the straight wire. The second trial started and, to the surprise of the scientists, the two crows both went for the bent wire, one held it down and the other unbent it. They both got meat out of their bottles. They came to a peaceful solution without verbal communication. Crows are probably smarter than we are.
they still shit all over the place and eat garbage
like seriously their brain-to-body size ratio is equal to that of a chimpanzee
They vocalize anger, sadness, or happiness in response to things
they are scary smart at solving puzzles
some crows stay with their mates until one of them dies
they can remember faces
SIDENOTE HERE BECAUSE HOLY SHIT. They did an experiment where these guys wore masks and some of them fucked with crows. Pretty soon the crows recognized the masks = douchebag. But the nice guys with masks they left alone. THEN, OH WE’RE NOT DONE, NO SIR crows that WEREN’T EVEN IN THE EXPERIMENT AND NEVER SAW THE MASK BEFORE knew about mask-dudes and attacked them on sight. THEY PASSED ON THE FUCKING INFORMATION TO THEIR CROW BUDDIES.
They remember places where crows were killed by farmers and change their migration patterns.
A colleague of my dad’s lives next to a lake, and looked out the window one morning to see a duck trapped in the ice. A crow swooped down. “Oh hell,” she thought, expecting carnage, because crows are opportunists. But the crow chipped at the ice with its beak until the duck was free.
Idk of this counts but a few crows saved me from a magpie swooping attack once ,they’re bros who can tell when magpies are being unreasonable and need to chill
I love crows so damn much. When I was fifteen, I hit a pretty serious bout of depression, to the point I was in my room for months. Well, a family of crows made a nest in a tree outside my window. There were two parents and two chicks. One chick was healthy and strong. One was weak, and had a caw like something being strained. It sounded more like a rooster crowing and so my parents jokingly named him ‘Buck’.Well… months passed and Buck’s sibling was taught to fly. His parents focused on the sibling because the sibling was strong. The father stayed behind to try and teach Buck, but I saw him try to fly, fail, and crash to the floor. His father helped him back up into the tree.
Every day, I would watch Buck from my window until one day I opened it and started talking to him. He was small and gangly and he couldn’t caw right. His feathers were all over the place and I felt a kinship. So I made a deal with him. I told him that if he could do it, if he could fly, then I could find the strength to get up. Well… near the end of the season, after talking with him every day, I finally saw him get out of the nest. He went to the edge of his branch, braced himself, and jumped… and just before he hit the ground, he soared back up into the sky. I cheered harder than I ever had before.
That winter, Buck left the area. I was crestfallen. I felt like I’d lost a friend. But I was so damn proud of him.
Cut to the next spring? I’m walking up the driveway one day when suddenly I hear a sound… a broken caw. I look up, and Buck is sitting in a tree above my head. He stared at me and puffed his feathers, then hopped down in front of me and cawed again. I was so damn thrilled, and I told him how proud I was of him. He ruffled his feathers and then soared off into his old tree.
That summer? I heard two broken caws. One from Buck… and one from his chick.
Cut to ten years later? We have a family of crows who all have a very distinct caw and they come here and spend every spring, summer, and fall on our property. Buck still greets me every spring.
that last reply made me wanna cry. that’s so beautiful.
this one morning i kept hearing really loud caws, i remember it was like 5am, LIKE REALLY LOUD AND ANNOYING AND AGGRESSIVE, so loud that i could hear it through a closed window, and i eventually went outside to check it out. there was a crow on my front lawn, it had an injury on its head and couldn’t fly and there were two other crows circling right above it, and they were cawing like mad.
i tried to get close and take a better look and one of them dived super low and tried to attack me. so i went back in the house and chopped some sliced raw meat and tossed it at him from a distance.
a few more times later, very soon after, they could tell i was trying to help, and did not attack me. i was “allowed” to walk up close and pick him up, he couldn’t drink water properly so i had to dip my finger in a bowl and stick it in his mouth.
i did this few times a day and it went on for about a week before he disappeared, i thought he recovered and left, but he came back the next day and lands on me, and i see him around the block quite often, and he would come sit on my shoulder for a few minutes and then fly away again. i feel like i’ve adopted a son.
Best birbs !!
your son is Beautiful and Strong
every time I see this post it has different crow stories and every time I reblog it again because all crow stories are good stories
Such little cutie pies 😍 not to be cliché but crows are 100% my favorite birbs
They know I’m on to them!
willowfoot 