Magpies are amazing. They are one of the very few that can recognize their own mirror images.
I will never forget how one morning, on my regular run, i saw a group of magpies on the ground, right beside the road. There were 4 magpies forming a line, they were looking at two other magpies just in front of them. One of the two magpies appeared to be dead - was laying flat on the ground, while the other one was on top of it, sort of like in a triumphant fashion. Victor and defeated. The victorious magpie was the only one "talking", appearing to be giving a speech, while the rest were listening. What it was proclaiming, it's anyone's guess. Never seen anything more glorious with my own eyes.
When out walking one night a few years back, I was lucky enough to find a baby jackdaw on the ground that must have fallen from its nest. It was completely cold and not moving. I picked it up and was about to discard it again, thinking it was dead, when I noticed its claw twitch slightly. So I cupped it in my hands to warm it and took it home with me and gradually nursed it back to health.
It stayed with me for about a year or more and even came on a couple of camping holidays round Ireland and Wales with me. I became quite a tourist attraction, as I'd be walking along a beach or in some countryside and suddenly this bird would appear as if from nowhere and land on my shoulder. passers by would be gobsmacked and ask to take a photo of the crazy bird man.
As the jackdaw got older, it got more independent and would go flying off for longer and longer periods until, one day it flew off to join another group of jackdaws in a park and never came back.
One of my coolest memories ever was one night me and the missus had gone out to dinner. The jackdaw had flown off somewhere, earlier in the day and not come back. When we returned home around midnight we found it fast asleep in its cage in the living room. It had come home, found us not there and let itself in through the cat-flap and went to bed, all by itself. Even though it had always been 'free' in the sense it never had a door on its cage and was free to fly off wherever and whenever it wanted, somehow that incident really touched me as it was like the bird was telling me that it considered our house its home too.
Absolutely amazing creatures and so intelligent. I read once that corvids have similar amounts of neurons in their brains to small monkeys but the folding of the corvid brain is more complex, so those neurons fit into a smaller brain volume. After having the privilege of spending that amount of time with one 'close up' I can certainly believe it.
> it was like the bird was telling me that it considered our house its home too
I volunteer at a raptor conservation site where most of the birds are free-flown every few days. It is extremely rare for a bird not to come back 'home' of its own accord. There is one bald eagle (fitted with telemetry) who sometimes flies a couple of miles away and then waits to be collected and driven back in a van. The storks literally walk back along a path from one of the displays to their own aviary.
Being fed by the keepers is obviously a factor in them coming back, but it is also worth bearing in mind that for some birds (e.g. a Peregrin falcon) a hunting flight is an extremely energy-intensive activity, a bit like a cheetah sprinting after a gazelle. Such birds in the wild might spend a lot of time perched in a tree waiting for an easy kill, rather than flying just because they can.
Coming back to crows, one respect in which they seem to cognitively outperform dogs is that they understand traffic and vehicles. Crows eating roadkill will hop out of the way when a vehicle passes, and then hop right back when the road is clear again.
That sounds like a great experience. Did you still have a cat residing in the house at the same time as the jackdaw stayed with you? If so, I’m curious to know what kind of relationship they might have had.
I’ve tried to rescue small birds (sparrows, robins, finches) that my cat has caught – but hasn’t killed – despite having two bells on his collar. I found that they either recovered quickly and were able to fly away after a couple of hours or else they died – more often than not. :(
No, we didn't have a cat then. As far as I know, there's something in cat saliva that's toxic to birds, which would explain why they hardly ever survive, after being rescued from cats.
Thanks for the response. I suspected the two species wouldn’t be compatible though I’ve heard of stranger relationships between individual animals.
I searched (DDG) for “cat saliva toxic to birds” and I found this very informative article [1] on the subject of rescuing birds from cats (also bringing the topic back to corvids). It concurs with what you say
> Regardless whether injuries have been found or not, every cat caught bird requires antibiotic treatment.
But more distressingly, it goes on to say that
> Releasing a seemingly uninjured cat caught bird or animal without pain relief and antibiotic treatment is therefore irresponsible and cruel, and will condemn the animal to prolonged suffering and death.
Now I know better. I’ll have to try getting a louder or more sensitive bell that makes it harder for the cat to creep up on its prey. The cat hasn’t brought back any birds or mice in the past couple of months but I don’t know whether that’s because it’s harder to catch prey at this time of year or because he has learned that we’ll just take the injured animal from him and keep him upstairs whenever he does.
I saw a crow funeral once. It was so fascinating. I saw the old crow, clearly not well, then 30 mins later he had passed and there were crows all around. Another 30 mins and they had all left again (except the dead one obvs).
I'm really fortunate to live directly under their flight path to a massive roosting site in east Vancouver. Every day at dusk, there is a crow highway in the sky. They are fascinating creatures.
I used to live near the flight path of crows retreating by dusk. For years, in warmer months, hundreds would gather daily at sunset at the local kiddie pool / nature park and have communal bath parties and squawk in the huge trees until the sun set, then fly off again.
Ologies has an interesting episode on the topic too¹. Plus, a general recommendation for the podcast, many of the episodes are lovingly holding the balance on weird and interesting.
Why watch wrestling or NatGeo when you can just go walk around outside and observe the eternal power struggle of nature?
My recent episode was on a trail when I startled a field mouse that was clueless to an imminent garden snake pounce. The snake reared up and noticed me, but the attention was focused completely on its escaping breakfast.
I had likely interrupted an hour long stalk and could detect annoyance in its exit slither.
I once read a book about beliefs of North American indians. It said Cheyennes divide birds into three groups: common, great and sacred. They count magpies into the sacred group! They like magpies because they're sociable, live close to humans, announce guests...
But basically, he covered the surface with bottle caps and a slot they birds could knock the caps into and it would feed them. They'd knock the caps in accidentally, and get food. He learned in an earlier experiment where they had to press a button to get food that the button had to be relatively close to the food. There was an even earlier step where he just fed them randomly to get them interested in the feeder in the first place.
They're very trainable animals. Smarter than my dog it seems. They're much more willing to experiment and seem to learn very quickly. Training my current dog requires tons of patience. He experiments very little while alternately repeating a behavior I'm trying to extinguish. I have to work with him in extremely small steps. Very sweet, but oh so hard to train.
Not disagreeing with you regarding dogs, you could have been describing mine. But I also find that when they really want something, they are more cunning and improvising. More than once have I got the feeling he just waits for me to leave so he can start with whatever shenanigans he's up to.
I visited a stately home in the UK once. One 19C owner had been an early adopter of electricity, and had used ferrets to help lay the cabling rather than rip up the impressive wooden flooring.
Lots of insightful videos on how he builds his devices and trains the birds to use them. For example, a simpler device where pressing a red button dispenses food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alpCl6xDSRU
At some point corvids are going to learn that humans deliver food via drones, and the race will be on. I pretty sure they will figure out what color of drone the local grocery store is using.
I once watched a group of three ravens work together to raid a McDonald's trash bin. Two would push in the (admittedly very weak-sprinted) door, while the third would hop in and out, dropping fries on the ground, they all took turns at each role and had a veritable feast.
I've imagined a brave new world where special animals clean up litter, delivering it to a bin for kibble. "Remember to scatter your napkins children! We wouldn't want the squirrels to starve!"
Honestly if you could make the training procedure fast and efficient (perhaps even automating that part?), this seems like a very economical litter clean-up technique. Just stick a machine out doors with a solar panel on the top, and come by once a month to empty the bin and refill the food.
You'd need to make sure the exchange rate (food per trash) is set based on the weight of the trash in order to avoid incentivizing the birds from tearing trash into smaller pieces for more food. And you might need some decent machine vision to reject non trash. Seems eminently solveable though.
Animals (specifically corvids) don't measure things by weight and determine an exchange rate, they just look at them with a 1:1 ratio and check for similarity.
In this particular set up, they would simply correlate food with particular types of trash that they have been trained with and dump only those kinds of trash into the apparatus. To them, tearing up the trash would be more effort than finding new trash.
I'm not suggesting the bird will think in terms of an exchange rate, I'm suggesting they may experiment with random behaviors (like tearing things in half) and it's important that none of those behaviors are re-inforced by leading to more food output. And I do not think it's at all unreasonable to suspect that the bird learns that putting a piece of trash in a slot yields 1 foot pellet, so if they tear the trash in two they can get 2 pellets.
A crow at the beginning of this talk figured out how to bend a metal wire to use as a tool when a straight wire wouldn't work.
Incidentally one of the next recommended videos after was of my fiancée's cousin who's into studying corvids, and who has been most of my point of reference :).
You assume that to corvids, tearing the trash into two is an easier task to experiment with. It's not. Corvids, just like smarter humans, look for the easiest way to do something. Like another one of the children comments to mine says, they would rather find another way to "reuse" the trash, perhaps by finding some opening to the trash storage, or finding a nearby huge stash of trash which was not the objective, such as a landfill, or experimenting with other materials to see if they work (the reason why mechanical contraptions would barely work with magpies, etc. but would work with most other birds).
You're confidently constructing a very complicated theory of crow psychology here with zero reference to sources except your conversations with family members.
If you're interested, you can always refer to the research from the Ornithology Institute of Oxford University, since that's where they work. Won't give out anymore info, or I'd be doxxing myself.
Ad the water displacement video: It seems to me that the crow would be able to drink the water just fine without throwing the pebble in? Perhaps a cargo cult?
Apparently, a dolphin Kelly discovered the exchange rate to be one fish per one piece of paper... thus tearing a larger piece of paper into smaller parts, and getting a reward for each small piece. They 'gamed' the exchange rate into their advantage.
> This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming.
Yes, rather than exchange rate, I'd be more worried about corvids carrying trash from the landfill to exchange it to food. Or, in case of cigarette stubs, emptying well contained ashtrays to the tables and floors only to get to those valuable stubs.
This is more likely actually. Corvids tend to lean towards gaming the system in other ways, like breaking into the trash store and re-dumping the trash repeatedly (like the Indians did with snakes during the British Raj and the Vietnamese did with rats during French rule).
I blame being an operations researcher for always (pessimistically) first and foremost seeing how the system can be gamed. You have to think very very carefully what the objective function is and which kind of undesired solutions need to be forbidden using the constraints.
Yes, obviously this is possible. The extent to which it's actually a problem is easy to test. Where I live, it's already necessary to tightly close trash can lids to keep crows and racoons from rooting through it for food.
Theft seems to be such a problem in the Magpie bottle cap gig that the Magpies are so fast to claim their lot. They seem to be aware that other birds can snatch their hard-work.
It's only a matter of time before they implement a tax system to finance a police operation.
Related story, about dolphins doing a similar trick... and gaming the system:
> Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.
People have been using monkeys to harvest coconuts for a while, but Westerners just found out about that and there was a big outcry and boycotts. Meanwhile people employ dogs to chase ruminants around or train corvids to pick up litter.
I know one of the people who worked alongside Klein (and Unidan) at Binghamton U. She says wild crows are highly neophobic and it's hard to train them to accept the presence of a big machine and do stuff with it. (Our conversation was quite a few years ago so I'm a bit vague.) There was a lot of academic disagreement and fallout when Klein went forward with his Ted talk and made the experiment out to be much more exciting than it was.
There was a similar project — under the delightful name “Crowbar” — to train crows to gather cigarette butts. Ran out of funding. https://www.crowdedcities.com
Yeah, I've seen multiple instances of people claiming to have done this, but they always turn out to be scams. I believe a crow could he easily trained to move a bottle cap already on a table to the reward mechanism, but so far no one has ever shown birds coming with wild caught bottle caps to get more food.
I remember some study with training mice to be fed when pressing a button. They found that if they get a morsel every time they press the button they get bored of it. However if there was some randomisation as to how often they got a treat, they would sit there pressing the button all the time.
That's a Skinnerbox, named after the psychologist B. F. Skinner who did the experiment. It works on humans too, which is why RPG games drop random amounts of loot and xp.
The idea behind a Skinnerbox is it keeps the subjects performing the action even after they're satiated. So, if you wanted the magpies to keep collecting bottle caps even after they've had enough to eat, it might be helpful.
Based on my childhood memories of feeding birds, I don't expect the birds getting full would be a major concern.
Right? Birds are like my dogs, basically food black holes.
Besides, the amount of bottle caps the magpies in the experiment would be able to find in the wild would be a limiting factor keeping them on their toes.
I don’t think the result was that they got bored of it while it was producing rewards, it’s that when the reward stops coming, they very quickly stop the behavior. If you have unpredictable but net-positive rewards, then you keep pulling the lever for longer when it stops paying out.
So if you want to train a dog or other animal with a clicker or just with treats, the optimal strategy is probably not to give them treats every time they do the behavior.
Slot machines and the "smart" social media timelines (rather than pure chronological) are the apotheosis of this in humans. Switching both Facebook and Twitter to pure chronological view makes them way less addictive as the element of surprise is all but eliminated on most people's timelines. The platform no longer presents you with something different each time you pull down to refresh.
See, that's where it gets interesting. We can then move on to the next stage of the experiment where we give the crows hands, allowing them to fix the machine themselves.
I've seen this before with crows, squirrels, cigarette butts for example. But my thought is always; how do I prevent one hundred pigeons from descending on this feeder?
Because that's all I see in the city where I live, pigeons, pigeons, and more pigeons.
Sure there are corvids too, seagulls of course near the sea, but if any food is outside pigeons will flock to this spot.
I guess magpies are one of the few birds that can figure out how to get the actual food so the others won't bother.
But I assume there's a training stage where you actually have to teach the magpies about the food by leaving some out for them.
> But I assume there's a training stage where you actually have to teach the magpies about the food by leaving some out for them.
Corvids can be trained by "showing" them how it works and they can teach other birds how to use it. So you may not need to "leave out" food for just any bird but wait for crow or other corvid, show them how to use it, and then let them spread the word.
One thing to keep in mind is that birds generally don't follow human law, and will certainly find creative ways to source materials from stores, people's pockets, cars, homes etc.
There have been cases in the UK, I believe, where a couple picked up a discarded winning lottery ticket and tried to claim it. I think they got a suspended sentence, at least.
IIRC, video surveillance showed that it wasn't them who had purchased the ticket. (Or at least that they couldn't have.)
I don't necessarily agree with it, but that is the law in some countries/jurisdictions.
If we're talking magpies, then I have to drop a link to this wonderfully eerie setting of the old magpie rhyme ("one for sorrow, two for joy... etc") by the Unthank sisters https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fPbWEa1cyg
I find this so amazing.
Thinking what else cigarette butts, small plastic... How does system differentiate that birds does not cheat bringing all kind of small parts, woodchips, branches and similar ?
This is cool, but he needs to be careful wrt the exchange mechanism. If he sets this up in California but doesn't allow the magpies to set their own wages + hours he could be on the hook for healthcare and FICA contributions.
Luckily it’s in Sweden where there is no minimum wage law and no need to declare when the income is as low as for these birds. Also, the labour law is speciecist and does not apply to individuals who don’t pass as “human”
I remember, when I was a kid, we visited a national park (in Africa). The antelopes would eat cigarette butts, and we were told not to bring any with us (apparently, people would bring them, just to feed them). This was at a part of the park that had animals being rehabbed (or were permanent residents).
> Crows weigh ~1kg and cigarette butts ~5mg, i.e. ingesting a single cigarette butt is 10 times what would send a human to hospital.
This assumes that humans and crows are physiologically identical, which they are not. Are the affected by tobacco in the same manner? How much do they end up injesting from the typical butt?
> This assumes that humans and crows are physiologically identical
I accept that this is partially relevant, but:
Since humans choose to consume tobacco, and animals including birds generally won't (hence tobacco plants are becoming invasive), if anything we should expect humans to have a higher tolerance and crows to have a relatively lower tolerance for tobacco products.
Is your point that it should be considered ethical until your questions have been exhausted? That isn't a good standard of ethics.
I will never forget how one morning, on my regular run, i saw a group of magpies on the ground, right beside the road. There were 4 magpies forming a line, they were looking at two other magpies just in front of them. One of the two magpies appeared to be dead - was laying flat on the ground, while the other one was on top of it, sort of like in a triumphant fashion. Victor and defeated. The victorious magpie was the only one "talking", appearing to be giving a speech, while the rest were listening. What it was proclaiming, it's anyone's guess. Never seen anything more glorious with my own eyes.