Corvid Horrors!

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Welcome to Creature, feature production of I Heart Radio. I'm
your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
and evolutionary biology, and welcome to part two of our
Creature We'm spook Tacular. Today we're visiting the spookiest, smartest,
most spectacular family in the annual Kingdom, the Corvids, Crows, ravens, rooks,

(00:30):
and more. Are crows the smartest being on Earth? Do
they mourn they're dead? Do they hold a grudge? Discover
this more as we answered the Agel question. Our Eurasian
magpies too obsessed with themselves? Joining me today, I have
an incredibly exciting and special gifts that I have been
looking forward to having on the show for some time.

(00:51):
She's an ornithologist who specializes in corvettes, a crow behavioral researcher,
Twitter celebrity creator of the crow or No hashtag, probably
a secret bird herself. Dr Kylee Swift. Ah, Hi, thanks
so much for having me, Katie. I am a big
fan of yours. I have been observing the crow or

(01:12):
No hashtag game on Twitter for a long time. It's
very fun. Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah,
it was, I can't. I think it's been like five
years that I've been playing this game for maybe maybe
only four, but like many years half every week that
I've been playing this and I'm like amazed and so

(01:35):
pleased that people keep coming back to ask this what
seems to be a very simple but turns out to
be very tricky question. Is that ambiguous black thing this
guy a crow or not? Right? Right? And I think
it's interesting. So one thing that people struggle with is
telling the difference between a crow and a raven. But

(01:57):
there are actually a lot of Corvid's other birds in
general that kind of look like a crow, but they aren't.
Just so the listener knows, Corvids is a family of
birds that includes crows, ravens, rooks, and jackdaws, which all
look actually pretty similar. But there are also other family
members such as Jay's magpies, nutcrackers, tree pies, which are

(02:21):
found in tropical regions, and chuffs, which are actually something
I just found out about. They're found in North Africa
and southern Eurasia. So a big diverse family of birds.
Uh so they're not all crow like, but a lot
of them really look like crows, and uh, they're also crows.

(02:43):
There's not just like one species of crow, right, there
are a whole bunch of different species of birds that
we call crows. Yeah, exactly. So if we if we
want to put our sort of taxonomy hats on and
think about how we classify animals. You just described corvette,
which is at the family level, so that's kind of
our biggest umbrella. And then if we drop down and

(03:07):
get a little more narrow from there, you have all
of the different genera or genus. And so the Corvus
genus is probably the one that's most familiar to people,
and that's the genus that houses specifically the crows, ravens,
and rooks. And in that genus alone, there are over
forty five different species of birds. So that is absolutely

(03:30):
one of the elements that makes this game a little
bit more interesting and fun is that it's not as
simple as just asking like American crow versus common raven.
But because I can draw on Corvitt's all around the world,
some of these species you know, most people have never
heard of, like the gray crow or maybe the pied

(03:51):
crow or the large build crow. It just adds another
fun element to this game and hopefully makes people appreciate
just how much diversity exist us within this genus and
this family. It's a game that I struggle with. I'm like, oh,
I know everything about birds. No, not at all. I
will see something like, oh, but its tail is shaped
like a triangle, so that means it must be Um,

(04:13):
that's that's got to be a raven. And it's like, no, no, no,
that's that's not I'm totally wrong every time. I mean,
I think I've talked on the show before sort of
like how you differentiate between a raven and a crow.
Like there are a few signs in terms of like
their voices, you know, Ravens, uh sort of have this
like long drawn out croak a little more and crows

(04:35):
have the cow cow cow kind of thing. And but
it's some of the distinctions are sort of a little
bit of a gray area because you could say, like, oh, well,
ravens are a little more solitary, but not always. They
sometimes like to hang out in groups. Crows generally hang
out in larger groups, but that's also not always true.
What are some ways that you can identify a crow

(04:57):
and what are sort of some of the tricky things
that hap and in terms of mistakes made with crow identification. Sure, so,
like you're hinting at, there's very few kind of objective
field marks things that are fool proof ways to tell
because they're just as a lot of sort of individual
variation and nuance that that makes it tricky. But generally speaking,

(05:20):
one of the best features to look for is Ravens
have these heavily textured lancelated throat feathers called hackles, and
it gives their throats sort of this like gruff beard
like appearance. And American crows, by contrast, have very smooth,
kind of fine hair like throats, and carrying crows they

(05:45):
edge a little bit hacklier, but it's still it's still
much like you know, it's like a teenager getting their
scruff in versus you know, mountain carrying crows are found
in like the u k Um, whereas American crows are
well found in America exactly. Yeah, yeah, Carrie, and crows
are basically found throughout Europe and Eurasia, so they're they're

(06:06):
very widespread species. Um, So look for those hackles. That's
one of the best no shave no shave crow member exactly.
Tail shape is the next one. Now for any crow
or no players. They might be aggravated with me this
week because I gave them a very very tricky photo yesterday,

(06:26):
which I'll get into in just a minute. But generally speaking,
the rule is ravens have a diamond shaped tail versus crows.
Whether it's American crow, Carrie, and crow. Really, all the
crow species have a square or kind of gently rounded
tail shape, right, so the one is like a like
a fan, like a hand fan, that's the crow, whereas

(06:48):
ravens kind of have an extra little point, tapered point
at the end of their tails. Yeah, those central tail
feathers are a bit longer than the rest. The one
time of year that can become kind of trick though,
is in the fall, when these birds are molting and
crows are growing in their new tail feathers. They can
get this kind of scalloped, you know, shape because the

(07:12):
feathers haven't completely grown in, and it can look just deceptively,
I just looks exactly like a ra They're just toying
with us at this toying with us, yes, But generally speaking,
like I said, tail shape and hackles are the too
easiest kind of foolproof ways to tell them apart behaviorally geographically,

(07:33):
you're more likely to find ravens in rural areas or
in wildland areas. They're more carrion specialists. But they'll absolutely
head into town, you know, if if they can, and
there's not too much competition, And especially folks living in
more rural cities like Bozeman for example, they're they're absolutely
used to ravens at their local target. Um and there

(07:56):
are ravens that breed in downtown l A. So, so
these are birds can be city birds versus crows. They're
pretty much exclusively city and rural birds. If they're in
the woods, it's because there's a campground nearby, but you
very rarely find them, you know, more than about twenty
miles away from any kind of human settlement. They are.

(08:16):
They are much more sort of what the scientific term
we'd use as a synanthrock or an animal that really
exists in close company with human beings kind of by
choice or by design, so to speak. Right, an urban
adapter who's just given up the wildlife almost entirely, sort
of like pigeons. Yeah, yeah, urban exploiters. Yeah, they are

(08:37):
not making the city, you know, they're not making do
in the city. Is they are making the cities work
for that. There's something too about crows that is so
charming to me, because they have all of the attitude
of other urban exploiting birds like seagulls and pigeons, but
there's something a little more elegant about it, where it's

(09:00):
I'm okay with the sass of a crow more than
I like. When a seagull gets mad at me, I
just feel kind of bullied, But when it's a crow
getting mad at me, it's sort of like, oh man,
this this crow is like like sassing me, and I
like it. There, I absolutely know what you're describing. There
is this sense of more playfulness because crows are so

(09:22):
aware of what they're doing and their relationships with people
that there's this sense of purpose behind it that you
can't help but like respect right, it's a little bit
of mischief. It's a little bit of the Adam's family mischief,
where yeah, they seem very sinister, but there's a playful
mischief that is I think really endearing. And I guess

(09:44):
this kind of ties into my question about you, which
is why did you pick birds and in particular corvids
as your area of research? So I grew up like
a total weird animal nerd. I thought I was a
wolf for a long time. I can't real late at
I bet you can't, Katie. Most people I meet are
you know, cool, cool people. When I need a person,

(10:06):
I just have to assume that they did not grow up.
Now I'm actually being sarcastic. I used to. I used
to pretend I was a cricket, so I feel like
we would have gotten along. Yeah, no, we absolutely did,
and those people always grow up to be the most
awesome people. But so I was really into you know,
animals and wolves, and and then as I grew up,

(10:28):
I kind of sort of lost favor with wolves a
little bit as a particular species. But I really liked
the kinds of things that I used to question and
enquire about wolves, and that was primarily focused on like
these really cool social dynamics that they live, and I
just thought that was so interesting and it seemed at
the time it seems so different than most other animals.

(10:49):
So then kind of like puttering along through you know,
school and getting into undergrad that was kind of my
time to to try to think more specifically about like, Okay,
what could I actually study? Because I have a d
h D and so it means that, like I have
a very hard time focusing obviously, and so you know,

(11:09):
it's it's not a trivial question for me to ask,
like what captivates me? Like, it's actually a really serious
question because if I don't get that answer right, then
I cannot stick to something. So I was like, Okay,
what can I realistically really dedicate myself too? And I
was like, well, I'm still really into these questions about
like social dynamics, and and it's really interesting too the

(11:32):
more I've sort of read how there seems to be
this connection between you know, social animals and more advanced
levels of cognitive function and executive function, and that seems
like just a really cool world to exist in and
do research on. And then sort of in compliment to that,
I always loved birds. I grew up brood watching with

(11:54):
my grandma, and so when I read Minded the Raven
by Berne Heinrich, that was kind of this aha moment
of like, holy crab, this is like the perfect marriage
of being able to watch and ask questions about birds
and exists in this space where we are enquiring about
how being social maybe plays into cognition and yeah, and

(12:18):
so that's kind of how I arrived at Corvid's and
then from there I was kind of like Corvitt's or bust,
which is not a strategy I recommend to other early professionals,
but it did work out for me. I was like,
if I'm going to go to graduate school, it's going
to be to study these birds. That is where I'm going.
And it took some time and a lot of hard work,

(12:39):
but I made that happen for myself, and I'm so
grateful that I had the opportunity that I did to
study these birds for so long. That's so interesting because
I've also always had a fascination with birds. When I
was a little kid, my mom said that I used
to chase birds around and she was like, what are
you doing. I was like, I feel like if they

(13:00):
got to know me, they would like me. There is
something fascinating about birds because they are evolutionarily speaking, so
different from us. They branched off like they're they're dinosaurs,
and so to have these living dinosaurs that actually display
such incredible emotional, social, and cognitive intelligence is really really fascinating,

(13:22):
and I think there's something to see that amount of
personality and something so dinosaur like. I think it's really
really cool and really exciting. I mean, I think there
are a lot of people that love bird watching. What's
kind of the difference between being a casual observer of
birds and actually researching their behavior because it's you know,

(13:47):
bird research goes a step beyond just like watching birds
in the binocular, they are all sorts of other mechanisms
at play there. The first difference is that as researchers,
we don't get to stop watching them just because it
gets boring, which really it makes the envy is of
the casual birdwatchers sometimes because that's the thing about science
that I feel like non scientists maybe don't appreciate um,

(14:11):
partly because it's not the way scientists is often portrayed
or delivered to them. But it is like tediousness with
like one percent ah cool moment, right, You're not just
like looking for, Hey, that bird just did something cool.
You actually have to code for very specific behaviors and movements,

(14:35):
and you have to you can't necessarily like freely interpret
like oh, the bird looks like he's maybe interested in
this thing, Like you have to actually kind of have
very strict observations of behavior that are quantifiable other otherwise
it's just your opinion on what the bird is doing
right exactly, which is are you know? Already hard enough

(14:57):
sometimes in the sciences, but it is especially hard when
you're trying to interpret animal behavior. Right, when we're trying
to interpret these things that, um, we can't literally ask
the animals, and so we are pretty vulnerable to if
we aren't super structured, we become more vulnerable to just
interpreting things through our own lens as people. Right, you

(15:18):
can't really psychoanalyze the crow and ask, like, how are
you feeling? I mean, you could with like actually with
a raven, right, and it could technically answer because they
can they can talk. It's just they probably won't say
much that makes sense. Well, so to be fair, all
the corvetts can talk, uh, and not just ravens, and
uh yeah, if we could, oh my gosh, that would

(15:41):
be that's a dream man. You just described the dream.
But to date, no one has ever gotten lucky enough
that a crave, that craven, that a raven or crow
just kind of offered up the answer to us. Yeah,
but you know what, that shouldn't stop anyone from asking
the question right, you know, statistically, one of these days

(16:02):
it will work right. So, one of these days I'll
be able to get an actual crow on the podcast
and interview it, and I'll be like, how is your childhood?
And I'll go for this week's episode, I thought we
could do a fun game. I'll play some bird noises

(16:23):
and we'll see if you can identify the call. Which
corvette do you think is making this mournful crow? If
you guessed raven, give yourself a pat on the back.
And who do you think is making this sound? That's

(16:45):
a crow? And who do you think is making this call?
That's Joe the Raven at Clovis Zoo and New Mexico
saying Hangman's coming. And if you think that's spooky, wait
until we return earn when we talk about a murder
of crows and crow murder. So imagine that you're walking

(17:10):
through a nice, quiet college campus, the University of Washington
in Seattle. You see a few figures standing in the distance.
Even from far away, you can tell something isn't quite right.
As you approach, you notice they're holding something, as if
offering it to some unseen entity. It dums on you

(17:31):
that all the figures are wearing masks of human faces
that look almost realistic but not quite, and the thing
in their hands it's a dead crow. And around them
you hear the anguished cry of other crows. One of
the figures holds up a sign it reads crow studies,

(17:52):
do not be alarmed. So, kaylie, explain yourself. This is
a pretty well known study. And to the casual observer,
it looks like a bunch of people wearing humanoid maths,
holding a dead crow and pleading with people not to

(18:14):
be alarmed. So what is going on? What are you
guys up to? Is this some kind of occult ritual
or is this actual science? So your description of what
it would appear to be was is what it was,
and it was real science. Though I had multiple people
asked me if it was some kind of cult ritual,

(18:37):
In fact I was. I was trying to get one
woman in a Seattle neighborhood. She had a crow nest
crow that was nesting in her backyard. And one of
the important things and how we set up the experiments,
as we always made sure to distance them the same
distance away from nests, so that how the crows responded
we could trust wasn't being influenced by how close or
far we were, And so I explained to her the

(19:00):
whole thing. You know, I had business cards at this point.
I told her I was a researcher with the UDUB
and I wanted to do the study on crows. I
showed her where the crow nest was. We had a
really nice conversation. What you guys were looking at is
like how the crows were going to respond to this
dead crow that you had. Yes, so, and at this stage,
you know, I it was just me. I didn't have
any of this the stuff with me or the masks,

(19:20):
but I had kind of primed her on what we
would be doing and it's and it seemed to be
going very well. And at the very end of the
conversation she was like, okay, so just I just want
to make sure is this is this any kind of
like satanic worship thing? Is that this is like no? So, yes,

(19:44):
you are that far off in thinking that people thought
that because they really did. But no, one of those
D and D Satanic cult rituals you know that they
do with the dungeons and dragons. Yes, yeah, I got
that question. Had a police offic us or pull over
at one point and asked me this one I was.
I had to actually hear way, well, well, I'll pause

(20:05):
those stories. I have great stories about what people thought
we were doing, but I should probably tell you what
we were actually doing. So the question that I spent
my time as a graduate student at the U working
on was why are crows so interested in their dead? What?
How does that manifest? And why you are they doing it.

(20:29):
My first experiment was based off of a previous study
that had been done on California scrub jays, which are
jayser in the corve dat family, and they found that
jays had a pretty strong response to dead jays, and
they hypothesized and seemed to get support for this idea
that maybe this is kind of an extension of anti
predator behaviors because how they responded to dead jays seemed

(20:53):
pretty similar actually to how they responded to predators. So
we wanted to follow that up with crows, because crows
likewise seem to display really strong reactions to their dead.
But we wanted to narrow in and be a little
bit more specific and ask kind of, okay, so if
it is an extension of anti predator behaviors, are they

(21:15):
may be learning something that is useful to them, And
so we asked if crows might use these so called
funerals to learn about new places, dangerous places. So if
they see a dead crow in a particular area, do
they sort of take a mental note and are like, oh,
you got to be more careful here or or not?
And then could they maybe be learning new predators specifically people?

(21:40):
And the reason we picked people is because people are
a really interesting element in the crow world because we
fall on such a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. Right like,
when a crow sees a red tail hawk, it can
pretty reliably predict that they're not going to be friends.
But people people can kind of go any number of ways.

(22:01):
They can turn out to just completely ignore them and
be sort of these neutral figures. They can be really
benevolent and offer them food and want to sort of
forge this relationship, or they can be sort of malicious
and even lethal. And so asking that question with people
is an interesting one because crows really do have this
moment where they sort of make an impression of somebody

(22:25):
that then you can measure when they encounter that person
in the future, which I think is really interesting too,
when you think about animal behavior in response to people,
where there are a lot of animals that just will
not necessarily learn to mediate their response to people, whereas
more social animals, like say the early ancestor to dogs,

(22:47):
this wolf like ancestor learned like, hey, I can actually
kind of go get close to some humans and they'll
actually feed me and they're actually good for me. So
it is it's always fascinating to me how some animals
to be the most simple examples like a housefly is
never gonna learn to be cool around a human like um.
But then you start to get more intelligent animals like

(23:10):
dogs but also birds, and they start to kind of
mediate their response, like actually, if I don't always run away,
if I don't always just automatically flee, I may actually
gain an advantage. Yeah, And I think that comparison between
crows and dogs is a really interesting one because both
of those animals have have really shown this sort of

(23:30):
co evolution with people where there's been this very clear
um evolutionary give and take where we have really shaped
them and vice versa. So getting back to our question
of you know, what are these funerals for? Is it
that they're an opportunity to learn about danger and here
are two specific things we can look to dangerous places

(23:54):
and dangerous people. And so the way that we actually
tested that was by going throughout the Seattle you know,
the city of Seattle, Greater Seattle area and identifying individual
breeding pairs. So we did this study all through the
spring and summer, and so we would identify a nest
and then we would sort of establish our experimental site

(24:16):
of certain distance away from the nest tree, and we
would start to feed them. Uh. And so what that
allowed us to do is over the course of three days,
we could get them used to coming to a place
for food. And that gave us a baseline of like
when we put you know, our our cheeto peanut combo down,
how quickly do they do? Cheetos were key because it

(24:37):
turns out, you know, crows like peanuts, but they don't
necessarily love them, and not every crow likes them, but
every crow likes Cheetos, And so that was kind of
early stages. We used bread, and then I couldn't use
bread because the goals would come in and they would
literally eat an entire loaf of bread before would even

(24:57):
show up. So it couldn't use bread, and then I
switched to peanuts, but it was just taking forever for
the crows to come. So then I finally like would
put out my big handful of peanuts and then I
would just like you know, salt Bay a little like
Cheetos on top, and then crows would come like that,
what's there? What's their favorite Cheetah's flavor? Just original classic? Yeah,
I just did original classic. I didn't want to get

(25:18):
too wild with any kind of season eggs, but that
gave us a baseline of of how quickly to crows
come down to the food, and then on the fourth
day we would introduce our our funeral element. There was
actually a few things we tested, but the most relevant
one to this conversation is a masked person holding a
dead crow. And the reason that we use those sort

(25:40):
of you know, Uncanny Valley style masks where they're very
sort of human like but but off right they kind
of look like a Michael Myers mask where it's like
because like the Michael Myers mask was just like I
think it casts of like Will Shatner's face, but like
with slightly more flesh colored, because like Michael Myers, that's
sort of a gray color. But your masks are slightly

(26:03):
more realistic, but it's still very creepy to look at.
It's very creepy. And the reason for that is so
originally in the so there was a facial recognition specific
study that was done out of the U DUB and
out of the lab that I eventually became a graduate student.
That's so they probably happened maybe five years before I

(26:23):
joined the lab. And for that study where they were
just asking can crows recognized people, they originally started with
these sort of cartoonish political masks, and they got some
very reasonable criticism that, well, of course crows are going
to remember that that's so different than a normal humans face,

(26:43):
Like you're really sort of giving them an edge by
using these very exaggerated masks. So to address that, John Marslist,
who's who was my p I and who ran that
facial recognition study, had an actual costume maker come in
and take molds of real people's faces. So when I

(27:04):
go out there and I told my volunteer, you know,
today you're gonna be Linda, Tomorrow you're gonna be Vivian,
people are always like ha l O l you named
your masks, and I'm like, no, Linda is a real person.
That's really her face. We stole her face. We stole
her face. And so the reason that the masks look
so creepy is because it really looks like you cut

(27:24):
somebody's face off and are just wearing it. But that's
the idea, right, that's how you make it realistic. And fortunately,
because crows don't have the same kind of frame of
reference for you know, Mike Myers, Michael Myers different Michael
myerscar both scary because they don't have that frame of reference, Like,

(27:45):
they're not going to be like scared, they're just they
might think, like, that person looks a little you know, off,
or maybe they don't notice it at all, hopefully the latter.
But there's certainly a much better approximation for a human
face than those sort of cartoonish mask right. Yet it
you know spirit Halloween store, right, And you don't want
to train them on a real person, right because first

(28:07):
of all, it's harder to control, like for facial expression. Also,
the crows will harass that person for the rest of
their life. Those are two excellent reasons, and then the
third is, you know, if you're going to do a
long term study where you want to expose them to
the same face over and over and over again. If
you're using a real person, that's a lot of pressure

(28:30):
and you're going to need to steal their face right right,
Like you know, you can't ask somebody to quit their
job in their life to come participate a crosstate for
the next ten years. Had an area stark in that
study would have been perfect exactly. So that's why we
use mass people to hold their dead crows. And so
that sort of establishes the like crows are used to

(28:50):
coming to a place to get said, one of these
days they show up and like, oh no, there's a person.
They're holding a dead crow. So kind of step one
from a data colle action perspective, or step two is
what does that moment look like? How many crows show up,
what kinds of sounds are they're making, how long do
they stick around for the police? Do they call the police? Yeah,

(29:14):
all those different kinds of questions. And then for the
next three days we reverted back to putting the food out.
So that's our first moment to look at do they
seem to be making any kind of mental note about this? Place,
because if the answer is no, then we would expect
to just be business as usual. Next day, they see

(29:35):
those cheetahs and they're like, all right, sweet food, time
come down, right. I wouldn't expect there to be any change, Right,
there was just a brutal murder here the other day,
But hey cheetahs, But hey cheetahs, exactly, We're going to
just come down just as quickly as we had been
over the course of those first three days. And then
the kind of second big test was if they see

(29:57):
that same mass person again, be a week later, only
now you know they're not holding a dead crow. Are
they going to just ignore them like any other schmell
on the street or are they going to freak out?
And we found that the answer to both of those
questions was yes, they do show more wariness after these

(30:18):
events in those areas even without that person or the
dead crow around, and the majority of birds in our
study if they saw that person again, would display behaviors
consistent with how they respond to threats, like they would dive,
bond them and alarm call, they would follow them. Uh.
And we obviously did a lot of controls to kind

(30:40):
of make sure that you know, as as one does
in science, to make sure that they're not inherently afraid
of these maths, that they don't inherently start not coming
to food after periods of time, Right, Like if Michael
Myers doesn't hold up a dead crow to them but
only feeds them Cheetos, they're not going to freak out.
They're not going to freak out. And I did that.

(31:00):
I literally did that experiment, so I could say that
for sure if Michael Myers or like creepy clowns were
only scared of them, because we associate that kind of
thing with like, oh, then they stab us. But if
they just offer us cheetos all the time and they're
pretty chill, you know, we're not gonna uh, we're not
going to be scared of them. And the same thing
the same thing with crows, it seems, which is really excellent. Yes, absolutely,

(31:24):
I mean it's I love that crows have good horror
movie survival instincts, Like you know what I mean, you
watch a horror movie. A lot of the characters in
a horror movie just have the worst instincts, like, oh,
I saw a man wearing like a leather face, Uh,
maybe I follow him, you know, just like, oh, there's

(31:45):
there's someone covered in blood. I'll go down the stairs
into the basement to see what they're up to. Like now,
these crows, like I will call for any reinforcements or
anything like that. I'm just gonna go. Yeah. Now, crows
are are very adapt at calling for reinforcements when they
think something nefarious is a foot right, and that that
is what we were able to show. So the visually,

(32:07):
the kind of set up for this, just so your
listeners can picture it a little better. Is so my
role I was lucky and that I never was the target.
So I was kind of the the nice, benevolent feeder.
I would I would show up with my little clipboard
and my camera on a tripod and I would put
the food out. So at first they'd see me in

(32:27):
that context. Where are you wearing a mask for that
as well? Or I wasn't. I was just myself for
that cool. So like now they are like, hey, it's Kayleie,
like she's a friend of crows, and yes it is.
That's how I met my best crow friend. Go I
actually go the crow yep, Because I I couldn't, you know,
I didn't engage in any supplementary feeding when the experiment

(32:48):
was going on, like I could only feed them in
that context. But then once it was done, then it
could be you know, all once the study is over,
is it ethical to become friends with your participants if
the participant is a crow? Yes, the answer is yes,
and I did. Um. So I was always kind of

(33:10):
standing there, you know, with my my camera and my clipboard,
and then I would have volunteers come and they would be,
you know, my my sort of like murderers, sort as
big they put the masks on and all of that,
and just as a way of sort of keeping and
collecting data, even just as it related to how quickly
the crows would come to the food. Outside of you know,

(33:30):
the main funeral day, I always had that tripod and
that seemed to be the thing that really caught a
lot of people's attention. Actually, So you know, we we
ran into a fair number shenanigans during the funeral experiments
where we would have upset homeowners. I mean, you guys
were wearing like serial killer masks holding up dead crows

(33:52):
while we had to sign Katie, as you said, we
had those signs. Yeah, I mean, if someone's like has
like a big bloody knife and like a crazy clown mask.
But they have a sign like do not be alarmed
clown study. I'll instantly relax. It'll be fine, of course,
of course. Yeah, no, I I can't blame you, and

(34:13):
you know I couldn't. I didn't blame people at the
time either. I think, um, people absolutely have a right
to be curious. Uh and aware. Did you ever get
the cops called on you? I did frequently, actually, yeah,
And they eventually they would kind of be like, are
you dumb one of those people, and I'll be like,

(34:33):
and then you just sort of take my name and
and there was a few times. My favorite was I
was doing one of these near Magnusent Park, which is
a pretty big park in Seattle, well known. And again
like I have my my volunteer, and this particular volunteer
got me in the trouble the most because Joel, he
was a sweetheart. He actually ended up taking a taxidermy

(34:54):
class and being my main taxidermist for the rest of
my studies. He was invaluable. But he's like six, like nine,
it's just a huge dude. Uh. And he he really
likes or at the time he would wear like kind
of mostly black and camma, and so seeing him in
one of those masks really freaked people out. And I

(35:14):
remember we were doing one of these studies near Magnazine
and this old, older woman came up to me and
she was like, you know, demanding to know what are
you doing. And so I explained, you know, I'm I'm
a researcher with you, dub. We're doing this experiment. And
that was one of the tests that involved also a
stuffed redtail hawk. So there was a redtail hawk on
the ground not far from well. The hawks actually were

(35:37):
like lifelike mounts um so they're they're even more sort
of conspicuous because they're kind of standing right. And so
I'm pointing all this stuff out and I have my clipboard.
It's full of data. You know, we've got our signs on,
I have a tripod. And I finished explaining it to
her and she goes, I don't believe you. I'm selling
the cops. It's just like, wow, what an elaborate ruse.

(36:02):
Can you act? We had just made all that up,
and so, you know, it was it was never a
big deal. I mean, like, do you think like Satanists
really have like a printed out Excel spreadsheet, Like is
that I mean, I maybe, look, I think that, you know,
I think the actual Church of Satan is pretty pretty chill,

(36:23):
Like there's like an actual Church of Satan and they're
mostly their thing is like I think religious freedom. We
have freedom, freedom of speech. Yeah, and just making sure
that I'm sure they are like actual practicing occultists who
uh who like a spreadsheet. So I don't want to generalize,
but I think typically I don't, I don't know. I mean, like,

(36:44):
right to me, if you're into the occult and like
you like to be organized and you have spreadsheets and
data and you run q Q plots, like, let me
know if that's the whole thing in acol, let me
know to find that, just so I can s to,
you know, craft this description more accurately. We had a

(37:05):
lot of sort of funny run ins and and I
but I do like to always sort of take a
moment to appreciate that, you know, for me, those stories
of being out in the field and having the cops
called and them coming and asking a few questions is
something that you know was never sort of threatening and
I can laugh about now, but recognizing that that's absolutely
not true for a lot of people, particularly people of color,

(37:28):
and that really sucks. It sucks for me to imagine
that my whiteness made doing this research possible in a
way that I might not have otherwise. And so I
like to laugh about these stories, but I am careful.
I try and be careful of recognizing that there's lots
of contexts where those stories wouldn't be funny at all,
and that's something we need to work on. Yeah, exactly.

(37:50):
I mean, there's the black Birders movement that I definitely
encourage people to check out on Twitter because in the
wake of the Central Park in it where a black birder,
Christian Cooper, was threatened by this white lady who said
that she would call the cops on him and specifically
tell them that he's black. She was clearly using the

(38:13):
cops to threaten his safety and intimidate them just because
he asked her to put her dog on a leash.
Another thing, don't have your dogs off leash, guys, because
that's really bad for birds or cats or cats. Yeah,
cats are bad too, they like to eat birds. Just
keep your keep your pets up. I love cats and dogs,

(38:33):
but not great for birds. So keep them in check
there and this guy was just asking her to put
her dog on leash and she called the cops on
him instead, which, as we know in this country isn't
actual can threaten your life if you are a person
of color. So I think that, yeah, it is. It
is interesting where it's like it does. It's like it's

(38:53):
sort of you guys can get away with a lot
of occult seeming stuff through through privilege and warranted a
number of pretty strange and funny questions, from Accolt to
Pokemon Go and everything in between. There are people will
make up all kinds of stories when they say a
person with a camera and they're just judging you based

(39:15):
on the fact that you have a camera. There are
people in masks holding dead crows. It's very judgmental. It's
I don't I don't know where people get off this
kind of stuff. Let's play another round of auditory guests
that Corvid, who do you suppose this is? That's a

(39:36):
carrion crow from the weather All Animal Rescue in the
UK saying hello. When we return, We're going to find
out how smart Corvid's really are. If I told you
this was a crow call, would you believe me. Well,

(39:57):
it certainly is, but it's no common crow or care
arian crow. It's the call of a new Caledonian crow
who happened to have quite a few tricks up their
sleeves or feathers. So we talked about your what it's
like to have done your crow funeral research, and how
it showed that they were able to learn people's faces.

(40:20):
We already knew that, but they were also able to
identify those faces as being dangerous, like they they responded differently.
If you're holding up the dead crow, they would freak
out there like this person is potentially dangerous. And they
also treated the location as a potential danger and were
more careful next time they came by. Even the allure

(40:40):
of cheetahs was not enough to get them to come
by without some caution. Yeah, and that, and that was
an important distinction because it would have actually been awesome
if um, the funeral event was enough to get them
to be like, Nope, I'm out of here, no peanuts
or cheetos from me. That would have lended itself to
a really easy see a useful management tool if there

(41:02):
are if there were situations, say you know where they've
been depredating on a sensitive species. If we could just
hang one of these for half an hour and take
it down and the crow stopped coming by, that would
be awesome. If scarecrows really worked, I don't think. I
think we would have solved that problem a long time ago.
That is absolutely true. So, yeah, it wasn't enough to

(41:23):
get them to completely evacuate, but they were cautious. Yeah.
Do you think that they can actually mourn their dead
or is it purely a survival instinct or is that
is even that distinction sort of fuzzy because it makes
me wonder like if our original like our mourning and

(41:44):
our fear of death and our sort of ritual around
death has something to do with self preservation that gets
extended into sort of these deep emotional places. So, just
from from your sort of observed asians, like, do you
think crows have like a a sense of death and
a sense of morning or do you think it is

(42:06):
that distinction hard to make at this point. I don't know,
and I'm really comfortable not knowing the answer to that question.
I think that we can be very confident that crows
use dead crows as a queue of risk and as
a learning opportunity, and I think it makes absolute sense
that for animals that do have really more ritualistic and

(42:28):
more emotionally invested responses, that that might have been the impetus,
right because we didn't go from nothing to you know,
a New Orleans funeral. There was a lot in between there,
and so so it makes sense that that first kind
of attentiveness might come from a place of self preservation.
But when we look at crows, I mean, these are

(42:50):
incredibly social animals, they're incredibly intelligent animals. When we look
at their brains, there's nothing we can point to to say,
we'll see here their missing this. This is why they
couldn't have the emotional intelligence of of a primate or
adulphin or human. They're just missing a chunk of brain
right there. Just that there's just it's just it's also

(43:11):
just not how brains work in general, Like you don't
like you can literally have a chunk of your brain
taken out and your brain is so it's called neuroplasticity,
that your brain can reorganize itself, that you actually regain
some of the abilities in certain cases, not always like
but you can actually regain abilities that are literally carved
out of your brain because it is a very complex

(43:34):
system in terms of evolution. It's true like as you
get like you, you do get like more additions onto
your brain, Like you get a prefrontal cortex, which is
very different from just having like, you know, a very
simple brain stem ponds madula and blagotta kind of set up.
But it is once you start to get to be
like a crow or human and your brain gets more

(43:56):
and more complex, and you do start to get the
like these more um kind of like integrated processes, it
is hard to just be like, uh, see the crow.
The crow brain is smaller than a human, so it
has to be dumb. It's just like our brain is
smaller than um. Like a blue whale. Blue whales have
a big brand just by volume. It's a huge I
feel like a blue whales brain is probably about as

(44:18):
big as like a child, yeah, a whole human child.
But you know, to say that a blue whale is
therefore much smarter than us, it's just kind of faulty reasoning.
It's all about relativity exactly, and humans and dolphins and
crows have a much bigger brand size relative to our
body size than we would expect So yeah, so you know,

(44:40):
crow brains. For all of the ways that they are different,
there isn't anything where we can say, oh, and the
fact that they're different in this way means that they
don't possess any kind of emotional intelligence. And at the
same time, you know, like I said, these are incredibly
social animals. They forge really long term relationships with one another.
I can how it would absolutely be valuable and adaptive

(45:03):
to have emotional commitments to their partners and to their flockmates.
At the same time, though, you know, having a deep
emotional investment, you know, we we I always start by
sort of asking what would be the adaptive value of
that and going into a long period of mourning. You know,

(45:23):
if you were a female, for example, you've just lost
your mate and you go into a long period of
mourning that precludes you from being able to take a
new partner and breed, that's probably not super helpful to you.
Right or morning you're lost, you know, kids for the season.
If it's early enough that you could attempt to remake

(45:44):
and lay another clutch, probably not super useful to spend
a bunch of time being super bummed out. So that's
why I'm kind of in the spot where you know,
I don't know what they're thinking, but I'm totally open
to the possibility that we learn that crows are much
more emotionally aware than than we currently understand about them.

(46:05):
To that point, I want to talk about some of
the surprising ways that corvid show intelligence because I think
we have this sense of like a, you know, like
humans were the most intelligent, and then like primates are
really really smart, and then maybe after that like dolphins,
and then maybe parrots like Alex the parrot was pretty smart.
I think that people don't realize how incredibly, almost spookily

(46:28):
intelligent corvids can be. One of the things that like
we use as sort of this very rough measure of
intelligence is tool used because like that requires very complicated
cognition to be able to pick up a thing and
use it for another task, Like it just requires so
many kind of parallel processing systems in your brain that
it indicates some amount of higher cognition. New Caledonian crows

(46:53):
are really interesting. I think we've talked about them on
the podcast before, but they look very much like an
American crow. They are found in New Caledonia, which is
an archipelago in the southwest Pacific Ocean. I mean, maybe
this is a question for you. Do you know, like
if there's a way to be able to distinguish visually

(47:14):
a New Caledonian crow from an American crow? I do so.
New Caledonian crows look like they're smiling, and the reason
for that is actually very much tied to their tool use.
They have this curve to their bill that gives the
bottom part of the bill, which is called the lower mandible,

(47:35):
sort of this like a little bit chalkier appearance, and
it kind of curves up and that what gives them.
That's what gives them their sort of smiley appearance. And
the reason that their bill has that particular shape is
actually that it's really important in allowing them the dexterity
that they need to manufacture tools. Gives them a set
appliers on their faces exactly if you could, like if

(47:59):
you had clower is on your face, you would also
be grinning all the time. Or maybe it be horrified.
I'm not sure, but crows are very happy about it.
Right in. These New Caledonian crows, like they love to
eat grubs and they will use sticks and little any
stick like tool that they can find to get grubs
out of wood. And now that like the easiest way

(48:19):
that they do this is they just take sort of
a straight stick, they put it in a hole, and
the grubs will instinctively bite at this intrusion, and then
they fish it out like catching a fish on a hook,
because the grub is biting down and they pull it out.
But that doesn't always work in every circumstance that they
are looking for grubs, Like the crows will actually take

(48:40):
one of these sticks and modify it so that it
works as a better grub extraction tool and can fit
into different spaces and can pick them up more effectively.
So they use very like you mentioned with their because
I didn't know it made them look like they were smiling,
and that's like the reason that's so cool. But yeah,
they will use those weeks to do this very precise ripping,

(49:02):
cutting and bending techniques on the stick to create basically
these like custom tools to be able to fish out grubs,
which I think we had previously only seen this in
like there there was Betty the captive New Caledonian crow,
so we had seen that in captivity, but it was

(49:23):
only relatively recently that we saw that they were also
doing this in the wild, which is really exciting because
like animals and captivity will behave differently than their counterparts
in the wild. So to find out that they actually
do it in the while, just like all these crows
just making making their little hooks and tools and getting
the grubs, that's really cool. It is, yeah, and it's
so so just to give a little bit more background

(49:44):
on Betty since you brought her up, so Betty was,
like you said, she was a wild caught New Caledonian crow,
and we had no prior to Betty that New Caledonian
crows make tools, and the one we were most familiar
with was they'll you're off the edges of pandanus leaves,
and the pandanas plant is a really rigid leaf. Picture

(50:06):
kind of like like an aloe leaf. It's it's not
that thick, but picture something rigid and serrated on the edge,
and so they'll shave off little, you know, the sides
of them and then they'll, like you say, they'll kind
of shave them down until they're the right width and length,
and then they'll stick those in and let the grips grab.
But our challenge as um animal behaviorists is there's a

(50:29):
lot of things animals do that can look on its
surface really sophisticated, but isn't necessarily guided cognitively, right, Like,
there's a lot of wit Like antswer a great example.
Ants did not go and get degrees in engineering school,
and yet they can build bridges. And it's not because
they understand physics. It's because each one executes a very

(50:50):
simple job and when you put that together, you get
something sophisticated. Right Like at the most base examples, there's
this I think it's as slimal, but it's very very
tiny organism that actually creates like each of them come
together to create a slug, like a multi unit slug
that's made out of a bunch of individuals, and then

(51:12):
it creates like when they are on a hostile environment,
this slug will spontaneously form a stem that reaches up
like a platform, and the ones at the very top
are these spores that can then like basically get sent
off to a better environment. And so it seems like
they are planning this out like Okay, we're in a

(51:32):
bad spot right now, we will form this collective and
then create this stem and then like send off like
the survivors like astronauts off to a better place, and
it seems like, oh, they're really all altruistic and planning. No,
it's all just it's basically piling on behavior that ends
up turning into what looks like this very complex thing,

(51:54):
and it's like it really is every one of them
for itself trying to pile on the other one, similar
to like how piranhas. It's like, oh, they like to
take turns eating, carry on. No, they just are all
kind of like piling on, and once one of them
gets a mouthful of food, they'll pull back to eat
the food and get pushed out of the way by
another piranha who also wants to eat the food. So

(52:17):
it's like intelligent behavior can just be crowd behavior that's
like totally self driven, not altruistic at all, not no
forethought at all, just a little what it looks like
automaton doing a single behavior, but then when you get
a bunch of them together or and then you can
kind of extrapolate that to an actual animal, like just

(52:38):
doing trial and air over and over again. But it's
just one behavior that they repeat and repeat and repeat.
But it's not they're not really thinking it through exactly.
So the experiment with Betty was, Okay, how much does
she really understand why the tool she needs works. So
what they presented Betty and they did this experiment in pairs.

(53:00):
So there was Betty and there was actually a second
bird in the cage with her, and they would give
them this little cylinder and at the bottom of the
cylinder was a little bucket of food. And it's too
far down and too narrow for the crows to actually
stick their heads in and pick up the bucket. So
they presented them with two tool options. One was a

(53:21):
hook and one was a straight piece of wire, and
and um, this was the first time that Betty and
her cage mate, as far as I know, had been
presented with those particular materials. And so clearly the goal
is can they assess that the correct tool for that
job is the hook. Unfortunately for the Peru, Betty and
the researchers at the time, or initially her cage mate

(53:44):
picked up the hook and then flew away and was like,
I don't want to do this stupid experiment. I'm gonna
go sit in the corner with my hook. And so
the researchers I'm sure are like that. Turls are always
kind of screwing up our experiments, and now you know,
what are we gonna do? And her Betty, she's hungry
and she has this wired there's a great view, you
can google it. And she's poking at the food at

(54:07):
the bottom and it's not working. And then she sort
of takes her hook and she pins it to the
bottom of the cylinder and she starts wrapping it around
and book up pups. Betty with a pook that she
has just spontaneously made, which was not even what the
study was about, because they just wasn't they wanted to
see if they could distinguish, like if they could see like, okay,

(54:28):
the straight one doesn't work, I have to use the hook.
They weren't looking to see if they'd make their own hook.
And Betty's like, pulls down my bird seed exactly. So
then she fishes down in there, she pulls out the bucket,
and like you said, we were like, oh my god,
don not only does she get it, but she actual
spontaneously made it. But then, as you said, more recently,

(54:50):
we put little backpacks with cameras on New Caledonian crows
and we sent them off, and we realized they freaking
make hooks all the time. And I just want to
take moment because this is really significant. So when it
comes to tools, tools and animals, the first thing to
understand is that, yes, using tools is rare. Less than

(55:11):
one percent of all of the animals on planet Earth
used tools. However, that one percent comprises a huge diversity
of organisms. So you have animals like chimpanzees and people,
well you also have like fish there and sea otters,
animals that you know are are using an object for

(55:32):
an you know, a sort of a novel purpose to
benefit them, right, And like woodpecker finches are I don't
want to be mean to them, but an arguably much
less intelligent bird that also uses a twig or a
cactus spine to basically impale a grub. But there's no
evidence that shows that they really fully understand like how

(55:54):
the tool works, other than just like I take this thing,
I stick it in, I get a thing out. Um. Again,
that's sort of more like what we're talking about earlier,
where I mean, rats are pretty intelligent, but you can
train them to press a lever and receive some reward
that doesn't necessarily mean that they understand the mechanics of
a lever, like how that lever works. Similarly, you can

(56:19):
We've studied chimpanzees and we see that they actually make
a pretty complex physics calculation when they are using a
tool like to reach something. But when we've tested them
to see if they have an understanding of math, absolutely not.
They do not have an understanding of math. So just
because they have an innate understanding of physics, like a baby,

(56:39):
like a human baby, I keep jumping from animal to
animal to animals. But again, like a human baby actually
has an innate understanding of physics. You have. You show
a baby a little ball roll up to a big ball,
and the baby expects like the little ball to just
kind of like bounce off the big ball and not
move the big ball because it has this understanding. If
you show a baby a little ball roll into a

(57:00):
big ball and it flies away, the baby stares at
it because it's little mind is blone, because it's like
I was not expecting that. The baby doesn't have a
physics degree. The baby doesn't understand anything about conservation of momentum.
The baby has an innate, kind of instinctive understanding of
certain physics that is sort of built into its brain,
but it doesn't have an understanding, a meta cognition of it.

(57:22):
So when an animal uses a tool and shows a
meta cognition of it, where it's like it not only
uses the tool, it understands why certain tools work and
why other tools don't, and like what it needs to
do to modify that tool to get it to work.
That's so exciting because that shows much more cognition than

(57:43):
you know, simply like I have a stick and when
I jam the stick over and over sometimes yea food time. Yeah.
And so that's the distinction I really like to drive
home to people is yes, a very few number of
species use tools, but there are there's very levels of
understanding in terms of how those animals actually cognitively understand

(58:05):
these tools. But then the next step and the reason
why New Caledonian crows have a stop dead in our
tracks are there are only two animals that make tools,
and that's a huge cognitively using tools and making tools.
And that's kind of that um like what you were saying,
that ability to actually have the intuition of how do

(58:27):
I modify something for a very specific task that is
much more challenging, and chimpanzees do it right, And the
two animals are primates and and the crows right. And
I think I'm waiting for primatologists to correct me on this,
but I think chimpanzees are the only primates that make
tools in the wild. I think there's some evidence of

(58:50):
other primates like orangutans being able to modify things in
captive settings. They don't. Yeah, Orientans like model it's not
necessarily a tool. It's like they make a bed and
they will modify branches to create a foundation for the
bed in a kind of specific way. And I think
that it starts to get like a little bit fuzzy,

(59:10):
like is that an actual tool, because they're not then
using that bed to get another thing. They're just birds
make beds. So it's really special that this a bird,
this animal that is, like you said, a dinosaur, is
so different from us in you know, so many ways,

(59:31):
is doing something that is incredibly unique and cognitively advanced.
Because that is a level of insight and understanding that
we should all be watching our backs around the crows
because it is impressive, especially you, because you had a
whole study where you're like, hey, here's a dead crow. Everybody. See.
That's why I was always a friendly person, because I

(59:54):
know I was planted ahead like the crow. I was like,
I am not going to be making hordes of enemies here.
There's gonna be like a Kaiser says, a moment where
they realize you were the mastermind the whole time. But
another another interesting thing, and I'm actually going to talk
about the Eurasian magpie. There's some research that suggests that

(01:00:17):
Eurasian magpies can possibly recognize themselves in mirrors. Um and
so this is an whole interesting thing that I have
very complex opinions about. It's the mirror test. And this
is the test where you basically plunk something down in
front of a mirror and you're like, okay, does this

(01:00:38):
animal recognize itself in the mirror? And you will put generally,
how it stands like you put a dot or a
mark on the animal without them knowing, like they're either
like sort of sedated, or you do it stealthily so
they don't know you've put something on them. And you
have a control group where you have you put a
dot on them or something, but it's invisible, so it's

(01:00:59):
like it's not the feeling of the dot and or mark,
and then you put them in front of a mirror
and then you see if they like look in the
mirror and they see the mark in the mirror and
then recognize, oh, that's on me, and then try to
remove it. I mean, I'll get in more about my
opinions about this test later, but it's an interesting kind
of human centric way of thinking about metacognition, Like we

(01:01:21):
recognize ourselves. We see ourselves in the mirror, we recognize
that as us, and then therefore you know, we have
a self awareness, which I think it may be a
little more complex than that. But in terms of animals
who have quote unquote past the mirror test includes obviously humans, chimpanzees, dolphins,
and elephants. There's a little bit of fuzziness here because

(01:01:44):
you'll have some individuals that do it, and then but
then you try other other animals in the same species
and then they won't do it. So it's kind of
a from individual to individual. But when studied, Eurasian magpies
also seemed to pass this test. So when colorful stickers
are put on their throats and in the same setup

(01:02:04):
that I described before, and they see themselves in the mirror.
They scratched at their next to try to remove the stickers,
which indicates that they have some awareness of like there
having some control over their body and then recognizing it
in the mirror. But one thing that I think is
interesting to me about this is we've tested it in

(01:02:25):
a lot of like very social animals, like very highly
socially emotionally intelligent animals like chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and and
then these magpies, like they're all very socially minded. I
wonder your opinion on on this test, and because I
think sometimes people jump to the conclusion that, oh, if
they can recognize themselves in the mirror, they have this

(01:02:47):
concept of self whereas like, how how much of it
is them recognizing themselves in the mirror, and how much
of it is and under just a simple understanding of
like the physics of a reflection, how much of it
is like a self awareness do you think or is there?
Because I'm curious to know if there have been studies

(01:03:08):
to see like how they respond not to a mirror
but just too like one of their cohorts, like another
bird with that mark in the same place as their own. Like,
do they just have very advanced like mirror neurons where
they like they think that the image is another bird,
but then they're so sympathetic to that they're like, oh,
I better check my neck to kind of thing. So

(01:03:29):
I was wondering what your opinion is on all of this,
So I um, I'm with you, Katie, and that people.
I often find myself confronted with people who are really
excited about the mirror tests, who are really excited that
these Eurasian magpies passed. And I always feel like in
the Debbi downer because number one, because when we say

(01:03:56):
they passed, we mean that too. There was two birds
that fast the mirror desk is not a great sample
side being his birds. And then they actually ended up
trying to repeat this study in jackdaws and they did
it the exact name ways, and jackdaws are another corvid,
you know, they're another bird in the corvid family. They
used to be in the Corvius genus, but we just

(01:04:16):
kicked them out and they did the exact name studies
and in those birds, even the control birds picked up
on the spots, which suggests that maybe those magpies had
a little bit more tactile sensory awareness of these than
than it showed. We've also done this study mirror tests
in New Caledonian crows, and New Caledonian crows are terrible

(01:04:39):
at it. Parrots are terrible at it. Anybody who in
the springtime has had a crow or a raven attacking
their side mirror in their car or their the windows
in their house probably are very familiar with the fact
that by and large these birds are actually really bad
at it. But what's really interesting and gets that one
of the questions you asked new it's not at least

(01:05:01):
in New Caledonian crows because they don't understand mirrors conceptually.
So New Caledonian crows can use mirrors to understand that
something they see in a mirror is actually happening behind them.
Oh that's so interesting, right, So they seem to understand
the properties of a mirror. So maybe it is just
a very sort of like anthrocentric, you know, because we

(01:05:25):
express self directed behaviors, you know, trying to look. So
the main things that when we put animals in front
of mirrors, the themes we see in terms of self
directed behaviors are we want to look at our mouths,
and we want to look at our genitals, the two
areas that we that we have a hard time investigating otherwise.
And that's what dolphins do, that's what primates do. That's

(01:05:47):
maybe that's what's going on with all these zoom called shenanigans.
But you know, birds only have the one hole and
it's covered with feathers generally, and their mouths aren't that
exciting something. You know, maybe they just aren't that interest
did in those self directed behaviors. But there was a
study that just came out a few weeks ago that
took a very different approach to try and tease out consciousness.

(01:06:13):
They went right to the source. They went right to
the brain to look at how the brain responded to
these these different kinds of scenarios they were getting at.
And based on the timing of when these neurons were firing,
they were able to pretty convincingly show that they weren't
just responding in kind of an automatic way when they're
in front of a mirror. No. So this this left

(01:06:36):
the mirror completely out of it. It had them trained
so that they knew if they saw lights to pack,
and then they gave them a series where the lights
were sometimes really faint and sometimes really bright, and they
looked at what their brains were doing when they were
presented with these faint lights, and based on kind of
the timing of when the neurons fired and whether or

(01:06:57):
not they fired, they were able to ascertain that actually
they were basically showing what we call a subjective consciousness.
They were really sort of like they were experiencing the
brightness of light right in a way that suggested a
conscious appreciation of it and not just like a reactionary

(01:07:19):
appreciation of it. It was a pretty complex study. I'm
hoping to write about it for my blog. I've reached
out to the folks that ran it, because I tell
you what, I read that study like twice and so
much of it just went right over my head, and
I've already got like questions, Yeah, right, it's it's a
complicated study for the listeners. I think one thing to

(01:07:39):
point out is that you can have an organism react
to light like a stimulus. Like you can have a nematode,
which is as close to having no brain as you
can get almost with an animal, and a nematode will
react to light. It has a very very primitive eye
spot that can react to light and dark, and and

(01:08:00):
it will react light, that doesn't mean it experiences the light.
When you look, you know, any one of us, like
looks at outside at the light, or you you look
at a TV screen and you see these lights, you
have all these sort of automated reaction to the light
where your people constricts, but you also have a conscious

(01:08:21):
experience of light. And quantifying that in animals is really
really hard because we don't even know how to quantify
consciousness and humans yet other than just being assured that
another person is saying like, hey, I do experience seeing
the light, and you just got to trust them because

(01:08:41):
you can't get inside their head. So it is really interesting.
I'm I'm really interested to see more about this study
because like being able to show that like there are
parts of the brain that light up basically when you're
when you're having sort of a not just an immediate
risk sponse, but an actual sort of experience of like

(01:09:03):
of the quality is like pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah, So
so that's probably going to be a much better bet
than the mirror tests at addressing consciousness and birds because
we just have such a mixed bag of results with
these mirror tests, and you know, maybe it's just not
a relevant way for these animals, you know, for every
animal to demonstrate that it has a sense of self.

(01:09:26):
It's it's something where I think some of these tests
that like we're trying to see whether an animal is
intelligent or conscious is really very human egocentric. Like we're
just so like, oh, it's got to be it's got
to think like a human to have that self awareness.
And I'm not sure that's true. Yeah, And that is
definitely our challenge, right as objective as we try and
be a scientist, we are ultimately you know, limited by

(01:09:51):
our our own lens and our imaginations for how we
can ask questions, and our imaginations are very much sort
of influenced by our human nous and and culturally too, right,
so how somebody in one part of the world and
from one culture may approach that question might be really
different than somebody else, Which is a great reason to
want to really expand, um the kinds of representations and science,

(01:10:15):
because being able to bring a lot of different styles
of thinking into the room is really helpful because collectively,
you know, we we need that because we are already
limited as people, absolutely and also just this is another
thing I like to talk about on the show, is
looking into cultural history and not having a sort of

(01:10:36):
snobbery of like, oh, you know, as scientists, we can
never listen to um sort of like folklore or other
cultures because that's unscientific. It's like, well, it may not
be enough for a study. But when you actually look
into things like anecdotal observations of birds of prey, like

(01:10:56):
in Australia picking up sticks and setting fires, we don't
have we have. I don't think there's been a definitive
study proving that yet. But if we had just ignored
aboriginal observations and like, no, there's no way a bird
would be smart enough to set fire like or intentionally
spread fire, then we may not have opened up this

(01:11:17):
whole avenue of research of like, hey, actually, there's a
chance that these birds are intentionally or not spreading fire
by picking up twigs from a wildfire somewhere else and
then spreading it to somewhere else and then reaping the
rewards by chasing all the prey items that are fleeing.
And so I think, yeah, definitely, when we close our

(01:11:39):
ears and eyes to other perspectives, other human perspectives were
really shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to
scientific research. And I say that as a podcaster who
doesn't do research, scolding you're scientists. It's absolutely true, and
you know, it's very relevant to the funeral stuff. We

(01:12:00):
were you know, what we were doing was asking very
specific novel questions, but the idea that corvids respond strongly
to their dead, we were absolutely not even close to
the first people to to discuss that. You can find
stories about it in the Koran for example. I mean,
human beings as as a species collectively have been very

(01:12:22):
aware of this, uh and it it's you know, it's
a pretty harmful, very colonialist approach to ignore traditional knowledge
and then claim discovery, and we repeat things that have
been around for years. So it's really important for us
to to listen to those sources of traditional knowledge and

(01:12:42):
to you know, give them credit as amazing naturalists and
as really important sources of information. When there is that
kind of overlap between that cultural knowledge and then when
it meets how we may be scientifically want to parse
a particular question. We are always using old assumptions and

(01:13:02):
old information that we have in order to build the
questions that we can actually scientifically quantify. So it's why
would we ignore anybody of knowledge just because oh, well
this hasn't you know, this isn't like scientifics like well no,
but neither is a bunch of other assumptions that we
make about nature that hasn't been parsed and picked apart

(01:13:25):
by actual experimentations and actual research observations. It makes me
think about too, like our cultural understanding of crows and
ravens and other corvid's, because I think we have this
sense of them, Oh they're kind of spooky and they're
bad omens, and that's been such a prominent thing, like

(01:13:47):
you know, especially in the West, like this idea that
like crows and ravens are our omens or or evil
or occult, like people thinking that you're doing some occult
business because I mean, to be fair, are having a
dead crow is a little little fuff, little fun, but
it is when you actually look into it, Uh, there

(01:14:08):
are that is not the universal cultural depiction of crows
or ravens at all. In fact, in a lot of
cultures they are seen as they can be highly intelligent,
they can be like in myths like as like highly
intelligent like tricksters or or thinkers. They can be um

(01:14:28):
you know, actually the opposite, like good omens signs of
abundance and of of good luck. It's not necessarily separated
by like region, because like corvids are a cosmopolitan species,
are found all over the world, you know, from China
to ancient Celtic culture. Crows were actually good, Like they

(01:14:50):
were good omens. They weren't necessarily negative. You know. I
think obviously we we appreciate crows now and I think
they're they're not as maligned these days as they used
to be. But it is something to consider when it's like,
you know, you imagine if we had only relied on
one cultural understanding of crows and an unchanging idea that

(01:15:11):
they're that they're bad and evil, like, we would never
find out how intelligent and and amazing and emotionally deep
that they are. Yeah, it's one of my favorite things
about crows is because of their proximity to us and
their cosmopolitan nous, they are really incorporated into the mythology

(01:15:32):
and the creation stories of almost all peoples around the world.
And it's pretty you know, I don't look at it
as a bad thing that they have really different reputations
depending on where in the world they are. I think
it's a really interesting aspect of them that, like you mentioned,
you know, in ancient Greece they were symbols of love.
In China, they were symbols of prophecy and luck. In

(01:15:55):
Hiata storytelling traditions, which is a tribe in the Coast
Salish read gen they were ravens were ultimate creators. Um.
So it's it's just really amazing how much humans and
corvids are sort of inextricably linked, and the way that
we've really used them to understand and tell stories about

(01:16:16):
how the world came to be and what it means.
Often when we think about our relations to animals, we
think about um domesticated animals or pets, not necessarily animals
that we haven't domesticated that are not pets, you know,
as cool as they are as cool any bird caretaker
will tell you that ravens and crows do not make

(01:16:37):
good pets. They are they're not. They are very cute.
Of course, everyone would love to have a fun friend
and a pet raven, but it's they just are too.
They're so strong willed, like they have they have their
own thing going on. They want to do their own stuff.
They don't really want to they they're very intelligent, and

(01:16:58):
you think, well, then that means they can be an
untrainable animal. Is not an unintelligent animal. It's one that
sees no reason to meet drains exactly. Yeah, And crows
and ravens really are in terms of pet pets are
really just sort of two year olds, kind of at
their most candy hopped up moment, but that can fly

(01:17:21):
and are smarter and never grow out of it. And
sharp clause and I'm sharp clause. Maybe not as much
as a raptor, but you know, they can make you
bleed to believe you me so yeah, not not good
for pets. Not good for pets. The wonderful thing is
it doesn't matter because wild birds are generally speaking, very

(01:17:43):
open to companionships. And it will have a few more boundaries,
but those boundaries keep everybody safer. But you can still
have these really wonderful and intimate relationships with wild birds
where they learned to recognize you and come with you,
and they maybe even bring you presence every once in
a while. I saw I saw it. It was so
funny because I was actually looking through Snopes because I

(01:18:05):
was trying to find if there were some chrow myths
that we should debunk, and I decided not to do that.
But I found this article about someone who was thought
that they were getting presents from from some I think
it was crows, like a little some pine or was
it the pop can? It was the pop lids on
the the soda can lids on the And guess who

(01:18:26):
was interviewed in the article I saw you was like, hey,
whole circle to find out if they were actually because
the person was saying, like, well, we'll leave out food
for them, and like, you know, we seem to have
this they really are interested in what our kids are
doing and they have this friendly relationship. And then they
left these pine fronds like stuck in a tab like

(01:18:48):
that you'd get off of a soda can and then
just like left them there, and like are they making
us presents? Uh? And I think like ultimately the answer is,
like who knows exactly. They definitely leave things behind in
places where they're routinely fed. The question is is it
an act of gratitude or is it just that these

(01:19:09):
birds are curious and sometimes carry things around and then
leave them because something better was there that they made.
All right, So if you trick or treat, which I
know is curtailed this year because of the pandemic, but like,
you're not necessarily guaranteed like to be able to go
trick or treat with a crow, Like they may leave
you something, or they may just yell at you, or

(01:19:31):
they may just yell at you. And I will tell you, Um,
I have paid friends with many crow in my time,
and I've I've never gotten a present. So that's my
main evidence for that. It can't be gratitude. At least
at least you didn't get a present, if you know
what I mean on your head a present, Yeah, because
that that can also And actually, since you brought it up,

(01:19:53):
I will just tell people you want to include this
U to be careful because one of the reasons it
is important to make boundaries with crows is that every
once in a while you'll get one that can get
really aggressive about wanting to get fed, and they will
come and give you a tap on the head and
it's not usually enough to cause to break skin, but
it is scary and it doesn't feel great. So that's

(01:20:14):
a good reason. You know that throwing a few peanuts
here and there. Totally fine most birds, but if you
see you know, don't don't try and coax these birds
into hand feeding because once we sort of break down those,
you know, all of the barriers, if you have a
hyper aggressive crow, you can end up leading it into
a situation where it will ultimately be hurt or euthanis

(01:20:35):
because it's scaring people. Just just respectful boundaries. It's not
it's you're not a You're not a Disney princess. Who's
gonna like have a bunch of crows a light on
your shoulders without consequently, right, I know, and I've tried,
so you take it from me, crow expert, that is
not in anyone's future. I think that's actually a really

(01:20:56):
good point because I think it is an important thing
where I really want to encourage people to enjoy nature
and not feel afraid, like not feel like, oh, I
can't interact with nature at all, otherwise I'm gonna ruin
something or I'm gonna get hurt. Um. But on the
other hand, it's just like you know, just there are
certain boundaries that you need to maintain, like you uh,

(01:21:19):
in general, like you know, don't Although we talked about
the cheetah study. I wouldn't recommend necessarily going out and
handing cheetos out to crows, as much as they might
love it, It's not probably the healthiest thing. Kaylee only
used a light sprinkle for her study, just a light seasoning.
Maybe that's something that's hard for humans to get comfortable with,
just co existing with an animal that we can't tame,

(01:21:42):
that we can't use, but that can live alongside us
and be friendly with us, but we can't own. And
I think we just have to like maybe relax, not
be such control freaks, just let that relationship be you know,
just mutual respect. Yeah, exactly. Think of it a little

(01:22:02):
bit like approaching a friendship with your boss, right, Like
you can be the boss. Crow is the boss, right,
you can be cordial and friendly, you know, d you know,
a kind gesture here and there, but you know, boundaries
are important, you don't you don't want to cross too many,
Like you don't want them like following you on Facebook
and coming to your house all the time. That would

(01:22:22):
be weird. So yeah, so you want to just have
that nice, friendly relationship, but you also want to be
able to be like, you know what, but I'm busy
today and not have it be a thing a polite
business casual relationship with crows. Right, yes, I love that
business casual. You have a crow, your business card, payper

(01:22:44):
peanut to it, give you your business card, but I
don't invite it for you know, into your house, right exactly. Well,
thank you so much for joining me today, Kaylee. This
has been amazing. I'm a big fan of your work,
big fan of crow or you guys. If you're on Twitter,
you can check out crow or no hashtag crow or
no where you can test your crow identification skills. And

(01:23:08):
but Kaylee is very tricky, so don't trust her. But
do you have anything to plug? Sure? So people can
find me on Twitter at corporate research, on Instagram at
corporate research, on Facebook corporate research, or on my blog.
I want to guess what it's called, um horse research,

(01:23:29):
did you know, Katie? Or the blog corporate research. I
have a ton of articles. I have articles about you
know them recognizing themselves in mirrors. I have articles about
whether or not they kill all the songbirds, all kinds
of good stuff in there, just anywhere on social media.
Google corporate research and I'm probably there. We're okay, Yeah,
it's fine to find a If you find a murder

(01:23:51):
of Crow's, Kyley's probably behind it all and that you
can find us as always at Creature feature Pot on
Instagram at Creature feet Pot on Twitter, that's f e
A T, not f e T. That is something very different,
and you can find me on Twitter at Katie Golden

(01:24:13):
just for you know, my random Katie thoughts, not always
about animals, but sometimes about animals as always, I am
pro bird rights where it turns out, you guys, birds
are pretty cool and I do think they should be president,
but you know that's just my opinion, not to get
all political on the podcast. Definitely birds should be president anyways,

(01:24:34):
would be a hundred times smarter than our guys. Get
get out and vote because I love animals, and you
can't love animals and not pay attention to politics, because hey,
some politicians actually are really bad for the planet and
do things that actively harm the environment, which is where

(01:24:54):
we all live and where animals live. And in particular,
the Trump administration has been exceedingly bad when it comes
to obviously environmental protections but also specifically protections for birds,
and just like aggressively taking away all of these protections
for birds, making it easier for people to kill birds,

(01:25:16):
for industries to kill birds. It's really horrible. So if
you love birds, get out and vote. You know, just
it's not good. It's not a good situation. If you
have any questions or pictures of your pets you want
to send, there's Creature Feature pot at gmail dot com.
Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show,

(01:25:39):
you can leave a rating or review. I read all
the reviews and it warms my little cold triveled bird heart.
Thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song
x Alumina. Creature Feature is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts like the one you just heard, visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or Hey guess what?
Where have you listen to your favorite shows? See you

(01:26:00):
next Wednesday. Un Happy Creature, We

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Creature Feature News

Follow Us On

Host

Katie Goldin

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Dateline NBC

The Breakfast Club

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Corvid Horrors!