Showing posts with label Crows. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crows. Show all posts

Speaking Crow


 Crows don’t have many friends amongst us humans. We see them as raucous black birds that are predatory and aren’t very crop friendly. That pretty well gives them three strikes against them.

However, they do have their supporters, or at least people who take the time to study them. They have been shown to be very intelligent and not just squawking nuisances.

They can be quite skilled in tool use and also have excellent memories for faces. If they see you messing about with one of their nests, they not only remember what you look like and start a commotion whenever they see you, but they also teach their offspring to get on your case too.

To most of us a crow squawking sounds like any other crow squawking, but is this also true of crows? Wascher et al decided to check out their voice recognition capabilities with a group of 8 crows housed in an aviary with the odd jackdaw around to confuse the unwary (1, 2).

Firstly the people issue. As they were in an aviary, the crows were fed regularly by people. The first job was to train the feeders to say “Hey” to the crows. The big experiment came when the researchers recorded 5 feeders saying “Hey” and 5 people who hadn’t been introduced to the crows also saying “Hey”.

Hey doesn’t say much, but if the person who feeds you says it, you might expect it to get your attention. This was not the case with the crows, though. The strange voices saying “Hey” got their attention, with them looking up to stare in the direction of the voice. Seems that crows are pretty suspicious of the motives of people shouting at them.

Now the same thing was done with the jackdaws and with jackdaws who were strangers. It seems that the crows responded favorably to their friends who were jackdaws when they heard their contact calls. Apparently they have particular friends with whom they like to hang out with and others who can just go hang.

The next step I guess for the team is to learn how to start speaking crow like the jackdaws so they can have a more meaningful conversation that just “hey”.

  1. Wascher et al, J. Animal Cognition, (2012). DOI: 10.1007/s10071-012-0508-8
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18025926


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A Bird's Eye View.


When we look at a bird, we say “Oh there’s a crow,” or maybe a magpie or a mockingbird or whatever the species is. As we go out into our local environment everyday we see the same birds who, quite naturally, regard it as their environment. If we have a bird feeder, then we note the birds that come to feed. We may get a noisy crow who seems to be waiting and starts screeching as soon as it sees us coming.

We assume that it is the same crow because it happens at the same place, but could we pick him or her out of a police line up? I would wager that the answer would be a resounding “No.” All crows look the same to us, but all us don’t look the same to a crow, or a mockingbird as has been well documented in the past.

There are two reports this month in the journal Animal Cognition on birds recognizing specific humans (1, 2). The first shows that magpies can recognize people who have climbed to peer into their nest and will explain to them the error of their ways in livid magpie every time they see them (1). The other deals with pigeons in the park who quickly learn who are nice and who are nasty in terms of sharing food. Even swopping overcoats doesn’t fool them (2).

I am surprised at the surprise of the researchers who find this surprising. Birds spend a deal of their time in the air looking at the bigger scheme of things from an elevated viewpoint. They obviously have both sharp eyes and an extraordinary good pattern recognition and rapid processing ability, otherwise they would miss the lurking ground-based predator or the little snippet of food, or even worse that small entrance amongst the leaves to their nest site as the approach rapidly from a height.

The other point which I feel is almost too obvious to mention is that one crow, for example, recognizes other individual crows in spite of none of them wearing name-tags. The question that I would like answered is does that magpie recognize individual crows? Or would he say, if asked, “Oh crows, they all look alike to me.”

  1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/906q30818lv87592/
  2. http://www.springerlink.com/content/h4570207731l47h6/