Crows, and especially ravens, are incredibly intelligent, able to find and use tools and capable of abstract thought. Check this out.
Yes, it's very interesting how & what crows & ravens do & are capable of doing. I remember seeing a show once, or read it in something(?), about crows dropping seeds & nuts onto a roadway being they know human vehicles will drive over them & crush or split them open. After this is done courtesy of human drivers, the crows fly down & pick up & eat or bring back to the nest the opened seed or nut.
Yes, crows are thought to be about as bright as a three-year-old child. We're certainly not used to thinking of birds -- the surviving descendants of dinosaurs -- as being intelligent. Check out this girl, who gets gifts from crows.
On the hobby boards I frequent, we're discussing the new Fantastic Voyage Proteus model kit that just came out. There's been much discussion of the features of the full sized set piece, and the various miniatures, some of us wondering where they may be today for the sake of reference. Relevant to this conversation was the final fate of the 2 1/2-inch model, used for the hypodermic insertion shot - it was sitting on a window sill in the studio, and someone saw a crow steal it.
That was crows in Japan and they are even smarter than that. They deliberately drop the nuts in the cross walk, not in the intersection where cars always run and they might get run over, and then wait for the lights and sounds which signify it is safe to go in the cross walk to get their newly opened nuts.
Seagulls are also smart little bastards. I like to go to a place called Point Loma Seafoods which is a place you can buy fresh locally caught fish and for a small charge they will even fry it, grill it, or smoke it for you. They have an outdoor patio next to the harbor where the commercial fisherman dock their boats (PLSF buy much of their fish fresh each morning from those fisherman) and the seagulls target that patio for free food. The work in teams, one will be the distractor who lands close but just out of reach who makes lots of squawking sounds. When you look at the first bird a second one will dive in and try to grab your fish and chips or fish sandwich. The birds will also switch off taking turns being either the distractor or the one grabbing the food. Sea lions are real opportunistic sons of bitches as well. They recognizes the fishing boats and will stay right beside them so as a fisherman is reeling in a fish the fuckers will swim up and steal it right off the line. Many a time when I reel up my catch all is left is the head because the sea lion bite off the rest. Those bastards stink too.
I saw an articles about ravens (might have been crows) stealing the bait from ice fishing tip-ups. If you don't know, a tip-up is a simple device that sets over the drilled hole in the ice with bait in the water, and a flag that signals when the fish take the bait. The ravens would gently pull up a bit of the line, step on the line laying on the lake ice so the line wouldn't fall back in, then pull up a little more line, step on the line, etc.etc. until they got the bait out of the hole then steal it off the hook!
The Marine Corp is spending $54 million out at 29 Palms trying to relocate endangered desert tortoises and scare off or deter ravens and crows. Usually few of those birds live in the desert but people moving there means more food and water for them so their population has exploded and baby tortoises are literally being eaten to extinction by these birds humans enable to live in an area they are not naturally found.
well that sucks! Tortoises have a very low replacement/reproductive rate and are very "low density" to begin with. I hope somebody gets this straightened out.
(Struggles to restrain self from pointing out this is yet another example of human overpopulation ... )
