Speaker 1: Welcome to Creature, feature production of I Heart Radio. I'm
Speaker 1: your host of Many Parasites, Katie Golden. I studied psychology
Speaker 1: and evolutionary biology, and welcome to part two of our
Speaker 1: Creature We'm spook Tacular. Today we're visiting the spookiest, smartest,
Speaker 1: most spectacular family in the annual Kingdom, the Corvids, Crows, ravens, rooks,
Speaker 1: and more. Are crows the smartest being on Earth? Do
Speaker 1: they mourn they're dead? Do they hold a grudge? Discover
Speaker 1: this more as we answered the Agel question. Our Eurasian
Speaker 1: magpies too obsessed with themselves? Joining me today, I have
Speaker 1: an incredibly exciting and special gifts that I have been
Speaker 1: looking forward to having on the show for some time.
Speaker 1: She's an ornithologist who specializes in corvettes, a crow behavioral researcher,
Speaker 1: Twitter celebrity creator of the crow or No hashtag, probably
Speaker 1: a secret bird herself. Dr Kylee Swift. Ah, Hi, thanks
Speaker 1: so much for having me, Katie. I am a big
Speaker 1: fan of yours. I have been observing the crow or
Speaker 1: No hashtag game on Twitter for a long time. It's
Speaker 1: very fun. Yeah, I'm so glad to hear that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was, I can't. I think it's been like five
Speaker 1: years that I've been playing this game for maybe maybe
Speaker 1: only four, but like many years half every week that
Speaker 1: I've been playing this and I'm like amazed and so
Speaker 1: pleased that people keep coming back to ask this what
Speaker 1: seems to be a very simple but turns out to
Speaker 1: be very tricky question. Is that ambiguous black thing this
Speaker 1: guy a crow or not? Right? Right? And I think
Speaker 1: it's interesting. So one thing that people struggle with is
Speaker 1: telling the difference between a crow and a raven. But
Speaker 1: there are actually a lot of Corvid's other birds in
Speaker 1: general that kind of look like a crow, but they aren't.
Speaker 1: Just so the listener knows, Corvids is a family of
Speaker 1: birds that includes crows, ravens, rooks, and jackdaws, which all
Speaker 1: look actually pretty similar. But there are also other family
Speaker 1: members such as Jay's magpies, nutcrackers, tree pies, which are
Speaker 1: found in tropical regions, and chuffs, which are actually something
Speaker 1: I just found out about. They're found in North Africa
Speaker 1: and southern Eurasia. So a big diverse family of birds.
Speaker 1: Uh so they're not all crow like, but a lot
Speaker 1: of them really look like crows, and uh, they're also crows.
Speaker 1: There's not just like one species of crow, right, there
Speaker 1: are a whole bunch of different species of birds that
Speaker 1: we call crows. Yeah, exactly. So if we if we
Speaker 1: want to put our sort of taxonomy hats on and
Speaker 1: think about how we classify animals. You just described corvette,
Speaker 1: which is at the family level, so that's kind of
Speaker 1: our biggest umbrella. And then if we drop down and
Speaker 1: get a little more narrow from there, you have all
Speaker 1: of the different genera or genus. And so the Corvus
Speaker 1: genus is probably the one that's most familiar to people,
Speaker 1: and that's the genus that houses specifically the crows, ravens,
Speaker 1: and rooks. And in that genus alone, there are over
Speaker 1: forty five different species of birds. So that is absolutely
Speaker 1: one of the elements that makes this game a little
Speaker 1: bit more interesting and fun is that it's not as
Speaker 1: simple as just asking like American crow versus common raven.
Speaker 1: But because I can draw on Corvitt's all around the world,
Speaker 1: some of these species you know, most people have never
Speaker 1: heard of, like the gray crow or maybe the pied
Speaker 1: crow or the large build crow. It just adds another
Speaker 1: fun element to this game and hopefully makes people appreciate
Speaker 1: just how much diversity exist us within this genus and
Speaker 1: this family. It's a game that I struggle with. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I know everything about birds. No, not at all. I
Speaker 1: will see something like, oh, but its tail is shaped
Speaker 1: like a triangle, so that means it must be Um,
Speaker 1: that's that's got to be a raven. And it's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's that's not I'm totally wrong every time. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think I've talked on the show before sort of
Speaker 1: like how you differentiate between a raven and a crow.
Speaker 1: Like there are a few signs in terms of like
Speaker 1: their voices, you know, Ravens, uh sort of have this
Speaker 1: like long drawn out croak a little more and crows
Speaker 1: have the cow cow cow kind of thing. And but
Speaker 1: it's some of the distinctions are sort of a little
Speaker 1: bit of a gray area because you could say, like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: ravens are a little more solitary, but not always. They
Speaker 1: sometimes like to hang out in groups. Crows generally hang
Speaker 1: out in larger groups, but that's also not always true.
Speaker 1: What are some ways that you can identify a crow
Speaker 1: and what are sort of some of the tricky things
Speaker 1: that hap and in terms of mistakes made with crow identification. Sure, so,
Speaker 1: like you're hinting at, there's very few kind of objective
Speaker 1: field marks things that are fool proof ways to tell
Speaker 1: because they're just as a lot of sort of individual
Speaker 1: variation and nuance that that makes it tricky. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: one of the best features to look for is Ravens
Speaker 1: have these heavily textured lancelated throat feathers called hackles, and
Speaker 1: it gives their throats sort of this like gruff beard
Speaker 1: like appearance. And American crows, by contrast, have very smooth,
Speaker 1: kind of fine hair like throats, and carrying crows they
Speaker 1: edge a little bit hacklier, but it's still it's still
Speaker 1: much like you know, it's like a teenager getting their
Speaker 1: scruff in versus you know, mountain carrying crows are found
Speaker 1: in like the u k Um, whereas American crows are
Speaker 1: well found in America exactly. Yeah, yeah, Carrie, and crows
Speaker 1: are basically found throughout Europe and Eurasia, so they're they're
Speaker 1: very widespread species. Um, So look for those hackles. That's
Speaker 1: one of the best no shave no shave crow member exactly.
Speaker 1: Tail shape is the next one. Now for any crow
Speaker 1: or no players. They might be aggravated with me this
Speaker 1: week because I gave them a very very tricky photo yesterday,
Speaker 1: which I'll get into in just a minute. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: the rule is ravens have a diamond shaped tail versus crows.
Speaker 1: Whether it's American crow, Carrie, and crow. Really, all the
Speaker 1: crow species have a square or kind of gently rounded
Speaker 1: tail shape, right, so the one is like a like
Speaker 1: a fan, like a hand fan, that's the crow, whereas
Speaker 1: ravens kind of have an extra little point, tapered point
Speaker 1: at the end of their tails. Yeah, those central tail
Speaker 1: feathers are a bit longer than the rest. The one
Speaker 1: time of year that can become kind of trick though,
Speaker 1: is in the fall, when these birds are molting and
Speaker 1: crows are growing in their new tail feathers. They can
Speaker 1: get this kind of scalloped, you know, shape because the
Speaker 1: feathers haven't completely grown in, and it can look just deceptively,
Speaker 1: I just looks exactly like a ra They're just toying
Speaker 1: with us at this toying with us, yes, But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: like I said, tail shape and hackles are the too
Speaker 1: easiest kind of foolproof ways to tell them apart behaviorally geographically,
Speaker 1: you're more likely to find ravens in rural areas or
Speaker 1: in wildland areas. They're more carrion specialists. But they'll absolutely
Speaker 1: head into town, you know, if if they can, and
Speaker 1: there's not too much competition, And especially folks living in
Speaker 1: more rural cities like Bozeman for example, they're they're absolutely
Speaker 1: used to ravens at their local target. Um and there
Speaker 1: are ravens that breed in downtown l A. So, so
Speaker 1: these are birds can be city birds versus crows. They're
Speaker 1: pretty much exclusively city and rural birds. If they're in
Speaker 1: the woods, it's because there's a campground nearby, but you
Speaker 1: very rarely find them, you know, more than about twenty
Speaker 1: miles away from any kind of human settlement. They are.
Speaker 1: They are much more sort of what the scientific term
Speaker 1: we'd use as a synanthrock or an animal that really
Speaker 1: exists in close company with human beings kind of by
Speaker 1: choice or by design, so to speak. Right, an urban
Speaker 1: adapter who's just given up the wildlife almost entirely, sort
Speaker 1: of like pigeons. Yeah, yeah, urban exploiters. Yeah, they are
Speaker 1: not making the city, you know, they're not making do
Speaker 1: in the city. Is they are making the cities work
Speaker 1: for that. There's something too about crows that is so
Speaker 1: charming to me, because they have all of the attitude
Speaker 1: of other urban exploiting birds like seagulls and pigeons, but
Speaker 1: there's something a little more elegant about it, where it's
Speaker 1: I'm okay with the sass of a crow more than
Speaker 1: I like. When a seagull gets mad at me, I
Speaker 1: just feel kind of bullied, But when it's a crow
Speaker 1: getting mad at me, it's sort of like, oh man,
Speaker 1: this this crow is like like sassing me, and I
Speaker 1: like it. There, I absolutely know what you're describing. There
Speaker 1: is this sense of more playfulness because crows are so
Speaker 1: aware of what they're doing and their relationships with people
Speaker 1: that there's this sense of purpose behind it that you
Speaker 1: can't help but like respect right, it's a little bit
Speaker 1: of mischief. It's a little bit of the Adam's family mischief,
Speaker 1: where yeah, they seem very sinister, but there's a playful
Speaker 1: mischief that is I think really endearing. And I guess
Speaker 1: this kind of ties into my question about you, which
Speaker 1: is why did you pick birds and in particular corvids
Speaker 1: as your area of research? So I grew up like
Speaker 1: a total weird animal nerd. I thought I was a
Speaker 1: wolf for a long time. I can't real late at
Speaker 1: I bet you can't, Katie. Most people I meet are
Speaker 1: you know, cool, cool people. When I need a person,
Speaker 1: I just have to assume that they did not grow up.
Speaker 1: Now I'm actually being sarcastic. I used to. I used
Speaker 1: to pretend I was a cricket, so I feel like
Speaker 1: we would have gotten along. Yeah, no, we absolutely did,
Speaker 1: and those people always grow up to be the most
Speaker 1: awesome people. But so I was really into you know,
Speaker 1: animals and wolves, and and then as I grew up,
Speaker 1: I kind of sort of lost favor with wolves a
Speaker 1: little bit as a particular species. But I really liked
Speaker 1: the kinds of things that I used to question and
Speaker 1: enquire about wolves, and that was primarily focused on like
Speaker 1: these really cool social dynamics that they live, and I
Speaker 1: just thought that was so interesting and it seemed at
Speaker 1: the time it seems so different than most other animals.
Speaker 1: So then kind of like puttering along through you know,
Speaker 1: school and getting into undergrad that was kind of my
Speaker 1: time to to try to think more specifically about like, Okay,
Speaker 1: what could I actually study? Because I have a d
Speaker 1: h D and so it means that, like I have
Speaker 1: a very hard time focusing obviously, and so you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not a trivial question for me to ask,
Speaker 1: like what captivates me? Like, it's actually a really serious
Speaker 1: question because if I don't get that answer right, then
Speaker 1: I cannot stick to something. So I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: what can I realistically really dedicate myself too? And I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I'm still really into these questions about
Speaker 1: like social dynamics, and and it's really interesting too the
Speaker 1: more I've sort of read how there seems to be
Speaker 1: this connection between you know, social animals and more advanced
Speaker 1: levels of cognitive function and executive function, and that seems
Speaker 1: like just a really cool world to exist in and
Speaker 1: do research on. And then sort of in compliment to that,
Speaker 1: I always loved birds. I grew up brood watching with
Speaker 1: my grandma, and so when I read Minded the Raven
Speaker 1: by Berne Heinrich, that was kind of this aha moment
Speaker 1: of like, holy crab, this is like the perfect marriage
Speaker 1: of being able to watch and ask questions about birds
Speaker 1: and exists in this space where we are enquiring about
Speaker 1: how being social maybe plays into cognition and yeah, and
Speaker 1: so that's kind of how I arrived at Corvid's and
Speaker 1: then from there I was kind of like Corvitt's or bust,
Speaker 1: which is not a strategy I recommend to other early professionals,
Speaker 1: but it did work out for me. I was like,
Speaker 1: if I'm going to go to graduate school, it's going
Speaker 1: to be to study these birds. That is where I'm going.
Speaker 1: And it took some time and a lot of hard work,
Speaker 1: but I made that happen for myself, and I'm so
Speaker 1: grateful that I had the opportunity that I did to
Speaker 1: study these birds for so long. That's so interesting because
Speaker 1: I've also always had a fascination with birds. When I
Speaker 1: was a little kid, my mom said that I used
Speaker 1: to chase birds around and she was like, what are
Speaker 1: you doing. I was like, I feel like if they
Speaker 1: got to know me, they would like me. There is
Speaker 1: something fascinating about birds because they are evolutionarily speaking, so
Speaker 1: different from us. They branched off like they're they're dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: and so to have these living dinosaurs that actually display
Speaker 1: such incredible emotional, social, and cognitive intelligence is really really fascinating,
Speaker 1: and I think there's something to see that amount of
Speaker 1: personality and something so dinosaur like. I think it's really
Speaker 1: really cool and really exciting. I mean, I think there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people that love bird watching. What's
Speaker 1: kind of the difference between being a casual observer of
Speaker 1: birds and actually researching their behavior because it's you know,
Speaker 1: bird research goes a step beyond just like watching birds
Speaker 1: in the binocular, they are all sorts of other mechanisms
Speaker 1: at play there. The first difference is that as researchers,
Speaker 1: we don't get to stop watching them just because it
Speaker 1: gets boring, which really it makes the envy is of
Speaker 1: the casual birdwatchers sometimes because that's the thing about science
Speaker 1: that I feel like non scientists maybe don't appreciate um,
Speaker 1: partly because it's not the way scientists is often portrayed
Speaker 1: or delivered to them. But it is like tediousness with
Speaker 1: like one percent ah cool moment, right, You're not just
Speaker 1: like looking for, Hey, that bird just did something cool.
Speaker 1: You actually have to code for very specific behaviors and movements,
Speaker 1: and you have to you can't necessarily like freely interpret
Speaker 1: like oh, the bird looks like he's maybe interested in
Speaker 1: this thing, Like you have to actually kind of have
Speaker 1: very strict observations of behavior that are quantifiable other otherwise
Speaker 1: it's just your opinion on what the bird is doing
Speaker 1: right exactly, which is are you know? Already hard enough
Speaker 1: sometimes in the sciences, but it is especially hard when
Speaker 1: you're trying to interpret animal behavior. Right, when we're trying
Speaker 1: to interpret these things that, um, we can't literally ask
Speaker 1: the animals, and so we are pretty vulnerable to if
Speaker 1: we aren't super structured, we become more vulnerable to just
Speaker 1: interpreting things through our own lens as people. Right, you
Speaker 1: can't really psychoanalyze the crow and ask, like, how are
Speaker 1: you feeling? I mean, you could with like actually with
Speaker 1: a raven, right, and it could technically answer because they
Speaker 1: can they can talk. It's just they probably won't say
Speaker 1: much that makes sense. Well, so to be fair, all
Speaker 1: the corvetts can talk, uh, and not just ravens, and
Speaker 1: uh yeah, if we could, oh my gosh, that would
Speaker 1: be that's a dream man. You just described the dream.
Speaker 1: But to date, no one has ever gotten lucky enough
Speaker 1: that a crave, that craven, that a raven or crow
Speaker 1: just kind of offered up the answer to us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know what, that shouldn't stop anyone from asking
Speaker 1: the question right, you know, statistically, one of these days
Speaker 1: it will work right. So, one of these days I'll
Speaker 1: be able to get an actual crow on the podcast
Speaker 1: and interview it, and I'll be like, how is your childhood?
Speaker 1: And I'll go for this week's episode, I thought we
Speaker 1: could do a fun game. I'll play some bird noises
Speaker 1: and we'll see if you can identify the call. Which
Speaker 1: corvette do you think is making this mournful crow? If
Speaker 1: you guessed raven, give yourself a pat on the back.
Speaker 1: And who do you think is making this sound? That's
Speaker 1: a crow? And who do you think is making this call?
Speaker 1: That's Joe the Raven at Clovis Zoo and New Mexico
Speaker 1: saying Hangman's coming. And if you think that's spooky, wait
Speaker 1: until we return earn when we talk about a murder
Speaker 1: of crows and crow murder. So imagine that you're walking
Speaker 1: through a nice, quiet college campus, the University of Washington
Speaker 1: in Seattle. You see a few figures standing in the distance.
Speaker 1: Even from far away, you can tell something isn't quite right.
Speaker 1: As you approach, you notice they're holding something, as if
Speaker 1: offering it to some unseen entity. It dums on you
Speaker 1: that all the figures are wearing masks of human faces
Speaker 1: that look almost realistic but not quite, and the thing
Speaker 1: in their hands it's a dead crow. And around them
Speaker 1: you hear the anguished cry of other crows. One of
Speaker 1: the figures holds up a sign it reads crow studies,
Speaker 1: do not be alarmed. So, kaylie, explain yourself. This is
Speaker 1: a pretty well known study. And to the casual observer,
Speaker 1: it looks like a bunch of people wearing humanoid maths,
Speaker 1: holding a dead crow and pleading with people not to
Speaker 1: be alarmed. So what is going on? What are you
Speaker 1: guys up to? Is this some kind of occult ritual
Speaker 1: or is this actual science? So your description of what
Speaker 1: it would appear to be was is what it was,
Speaker 1: and it was real science. Though I had multiple people
Speaker 1: asked me if it was some kind of cult ritual,
Speaker 1: In fact I was. I was trying to get one
Speaker 1: woman in a Seattle neighborhood. She had a crow nest
Speaker 1: crow that was nesting in her backyard. And one of
Speaker 1: the important things and how we set up the experiments,
Speaker 1: as we always made sure to distance them the same
Speaker 1: distance away from nests, so that how the crows responded
Speaker 1: we could trust wasn't being influenced by how close or
Speaker 1: far we were, And so I explained to her the
Speaker 1: whole thing. You know, I had business cards at this point.
Speaker 1: I told her I was a researcher with the UDUB
Speaker 1: and I wanted to do the study on crows. I
Speaker 1: showed her where the crow nest was. We had a
Speaker 1: really nice conversation. What you guys were looking at is
Speaker 1: like how the crows were going to respond to this
Speaker 1: dead crow that you had. Yes, so, and at this stage,
Speaker 1: you know, I it was just me. I didn't have
Speaker 1: any of this the stuff with me or the masks,
Speaker 1: but I had kind of primed her on what we
Speaker 1: would be doing and it's and it seemed to be
Speaker 1: going very well. And at the very end of the
Speaker 1: conversation she was like, okay, so just I just want
Speaker 1: to make sure is this is this any kind of
Speaker 1: like satanic worship thing? Is that this is like no? So, yes,
Speaker 1: you are that far off in thinking that people thought
Speaker 1: that because they really did. But no, one of those
Speaker 1: D and D Satanic cult rituals you know that they
Speaker 1: do with the dungeons and dragons. Yes, yeah, I got
Speaker 1: that question. Had a police offic us or pull over
Speaker 1: at one point and asked me this one I was.
Speaker 1: I had to actually hear way, well, well, I'll pause
Speaker 1: those stories. I have great stories about what people thought
Speaker 1: we were doing, but I should probably tell you what
Speaker 1: we were actually doing. So the question that I spent
Speaker 1: my time as a graduate student at the U working
Speaker 1: on was why are crows so interested in their dead? What?
Speaker 1: How does that manifest? And why you are they doing it.
Speaker 1: My first experiment was based off of a previous study
Speaker 1: that had been done on California scrub jays, which are
Speaker 1: jayser in the corve dat family, and they found that
Speaker 1: jays had a pretty strong response to dead jays, and
Speaker 1: they hypothesized and seemed to get support for this idea
Speaker 1: that maybe this is kind of an extension of anti
Speaker 1: predator behaviors because how they responded to dead jays seemed
Speaker 1: pretty similar actually to how they responded to predators. So
Speaker 1: we wanted to follow that up with crows, because crows
Speaker 1: likewise seem to display really strong reactions to their dead.
Speaker 1: But we wanted to narrow in and be a little
Speaker 1: bit more specific and ask kind of, okay, so if
Speaker 1: it is an extension of anti predator behaviors, are they
Speaker 1: may be learning something that is useful to them, And
Speaker 1: so we asked if crows might use these so called
Speaker 1: funerals to learn about new places, dangerous places. So if
Speaker 1: they see a dead crow in a particular area, do
Speaker 1: they sort of take a mental note and are like, oh,
Speaker 1: you got to be more careful here or or not?
Speaker 1: And then could they maybe be learning new predators specifically people?
Speaker 1: And the reason we picked people is because people are
Speaker 1: a really interesting element in the crow world because we
Speaker 1: fall on such a spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. Right like,
Speaker 1: when a crow sees a red tail hawk, it can
Speaker 1: pretty reliably predict that they're not going to be friends.
Speaker 1: But people people can kind of go any number of ways.
Speaker 1: They can turn out to just completely ignore them and
Speaker 1: be sort of these neutral figures. They can be really
Speaker 1: benevolent and offer them food and want to sort of
Speaker 1: forge this relationship, or they can be sort of malicious
Speaker 1: and even lethal. And so asking that question with people
Speaker 1: is an interesting one because crows really do have this
Speaker 1: moment where they sort of make an impression of somebody
Speaker 1: that then you can measure when they encounter that person
Speaker 1: in the future, which I think is really interesting too,
Speaker 1: when you think about animal behavior in response to people,
Speaker 1: where there are a lot of animals that just will
Speaker 1: not necessarily learn to mediate their response to people, whereas
Speaker 1: more social animals, like say the early ancestor to dogs,
Speaker 1: this wolf like ancestor learned like, hey, I can actually
Speaker 1: kind of go get close to some humans and they'll
Speaker 1: actually feed me and they're actually good for me. So
Speaker 1: it is it's always fascinating to me how some animals
Speaker 1: to be the most simple examples like a housefly is
Speaker 1: never gonna learn to be cool around a human like um.
Speaker 1: But then you start to get more intelligent animals like
Speaker 1: dogs but also birds, and they start to kind of
Speaker 1: mediate their response, like actually, if I don't always run away,
Speaker 1: if I don't always just automatically flee, I may actually
Speaker 1: gain an advantage. Yeah, And I think that comparison between
Speaker 1: crows and dogs is a really interesting one because both
Speaker 1: of those animals have have really shown this sort of
Speaker 1: co evolution with people where there's been this very clear
Speaker 1: um evolutionary give and take where we have really shaped
Speaker 1: them and vice versa. So getting back to our question
Speaker 1: of you know, what are these funerals for? Is it
Speaker 1: that they're an opportunity to learn about danger and here
Speaker 1: are two specific things we can look to dangerous places
Speaker 1: and dangerous people. And so the way that we actually
Speaker 1: tested that was by going throughout the Seattle you know,
Speaker 1: the city of Seattle, Greater Seattle area and identifying individual
Speaker 1: breeding pairs. So we did this study all through the
Speaker 1: spring and summer, and so we would identify a nest
Speaker 1: and then we would sort of establish our experimental site
Speaker 1: of certain distance away from the nest tree, and we
Speaker 1: would start to feed them. Uh. And so what that
Speaker 1: allowed us to do is over the course of three days,
Speaker 1: we could get them used to coming to a place
Speaker 1: for food. And that gave us a baseline of like
Speaker 1: when we put you know, our our cheeto peanut combo down,
Speaker 1: how quickly do they do? Cheetos were key because it
Speaker 1: turns out, you know, crows like peanuts, but they don't
Speaker 1: necessarily love them, and not every crow likes them, but
Speaker 1: every crow likes Cheetos, And so that was kind of
Speaker 1: early stages. We used bread, and then I couldn't use
Speaker 1: bread because the goals would come in and they would
Speaker 1: literally eat an entire loaf of bread before would even
Speaker 1: show up. So it couldn't use bread, and then I
Speaker 1: switched to peanuts, but it was just taking forever for
Speaker 1: the crows to come. So then I finally like would
Speaker 1: put out my big handful of peanuts and then I
Speaker 1: would just like you know, salt Bay a little like
Speaker 1: Cheetos on top, and then crows would come like that,
Speaker 1: what's there? What's their favorite Cheetah's flavor? Just original classic? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just did original classic. I didn't want to get
Speaker 1: too wild with any kind of season eggs, but that
Speaker 1: gave us a baseline of of how quickly to crows
Speaker 1: come down to the food, and then on the fourth
Speaker 1: day we would introduce our our funeral element. There was
Speaker 1: actually a few things we tested, but the most relevant
Speaker 1: one to this conversation is a masked person holding a
Speaker 1: dead crow. And the reason that we use those sort
Speaker 1: of you know, Uncanny Valley style masks where they're very
Speaker 1: sort of human like but but off right they kind
Speaker 1: of look like a Michael Myers mask where it's like
Speaker 1: because like the Michael Myers mask was just like I
Speaker 1: think it casts of like Will Shatner's face, but like
Speaker 1: with slightly more flesh colored, because like Michael Myers, that's
Speaker 1: sort of a gray color. But your masks are slightly
Speaker 1: more realistic, but it's still very creepy to look at.
Speaker 1: It's very creepy. And the reason for that is so
Speaker 1: originally in the so there was a facial recognition specific
Speaker 1: study that was done out of the U DUB and
Speaker 1: out of the lab that I eventually became a graduate student.
Speaker 1: That's so they probably happened maybe five years before I
Speaker 1: joined the lab. And for that study where they were
Speaker 1: just asking can crows recognized people, they originally started with
Speaker 1: these sort of cartoonish political masks, and they got some
Speaker 1: very reasonable criticism that, well, of course crows are going
Speaker 1: to remember that that's so different than a normal humans face,
Speaker 1: Like you're really sort of giving them an edge by
Speaker 1: using these very exaggerated masks. So to address that, John Marslist,
Speaker 1: who's who was my p I and who ran that
Speaker 1: facial recognition study, had an actual costume maker come in
Speaker 1: and take molds of real people's faces. So when I
Speaker 1: go out there and I told my volunteer, you know,
Speaker 1: today you're gonna be Linda, Tomorrow you're gonna be Vivian,
Speaker 1: people are always like ha l O l you named
Speaker 1: your masks, and I'm like, no, Linda is a real person.
Speaker 1: That's really her face. We stole her face. We stole
Speaker 1: her face. And so the reason that the masks look
Speaker 1: so creepy is because it really looks like you cut
Speaker 1: somebody's face off and are just wearing it. But that's
Speaker 1: the idea, right, that's how you make it realistic. And fortunately,
Speaker 1: because crows don't have the same kind of frame of
Speaker 1: reference for you know, Mike Myers, Michael Myers different Michael
Speaker 1: myerscar both scary because they don't have that frame of reference, Like,
Speaker 1: they're not going to be like scared, they're just they
Speaker 1: might think, like, that person looks a little you know, off,
Speaker 1: or maybe they don't notice it at all, hopefully the latter.
Speaker 1: But there's certainly a much better approximation for a human
Speaker 1: face than those sort of cartoonish mask right. Yet it
Speaker 1: you know spirit Halloween store, right, And you don't want
Speaker 1: to train them on a real person, right because first
Speaker 1: of all, it's harder to control, like for facial expression. Also,
Speaker 1: the crows will harass that person for the rest of
Speaker 1: their life. Those are two excellent reasons, and then the
Speaker 1: third is, you know, if you're going to do a
Speaker 1: long term study where you want to expose them to
Speaker 1: the same face over and over and over again. If
Speaker 1: you're using a real person, that's a lot of pressure
Speaker 1: and you're going to need to steal their face right right,
Speaker 1: Like you know, you can't ask somebody to quit their
Speaker 1: job in their life to come participate a crosstate for
Speaker 1: the next ten years. Had an area stark in that
Speaker 1: study would have been perfect exactly. So that's why we
Speaker 1: use mass people to hold their dead crows. And so
Speaker 1: that sort of establishes the like crows are used to
Speaker 1: coming to a place to get said, one of these
Speaker 1: days they show up and like, oh no, there's a person.
Speaker 1: They're holding a dead crow. So kind of step one
Speaker 1: from a data colle action perspective, or step two is
Speaker 1: what does that moment look like? How many crows show up,
Speaker 1: what kinds of sounds are they're making, how long do
Speaker 1: they stick around for the police? Do they call the police? Yeah,
Speaker 1: all those different kinds of questions. And then for the
Speaker 1: next three days we reverted back to putting the food out.
Speaker 1: So that's our first moment to look at do they
Speaker 1: seem to be making any kind of mental note about this? Place,
Speaker 1: because if the answer is no, then we would expect
Speaker 1: to just be business as usual. Next day, they see
Speaker 1: those cheetahs and they're like, all right, sweet food, time
Speaker 1: come down, right. I wouldn't expect there to be any change, Right,
Speaker 1: there was just a brutal murder here the other day,
Speaker 1: But hey cheetahs, But hey cheetahs, exactly, We're going to
Speaker 1: just come down just as quickly as we had been
Speaker 1: over the course of those first three days. And then
Speaker 1: the kind of second big test was if they see
Speaker 1: that same mass person again, be a week later, only
Speaker 1: now you know they're not holding a dead crow. Are
Speaker 1: they going to just ignore them like any other schmell
Speaker 1: on the street or are they going to freak out?
Speaker 1: And we found that the answer to both of those
Speaker 1: questions was yes, they do show more wariness after these
Speaker 1: events in those areas even without that person or the
Speaker 1: dead crow around, and the majority of birds in our
Speaker 1: study if they saw that person again, would display behaviors
Speaker 1: consistent with how they respond to threats, like they would dive,
Speaker 1: bond them and alarm call, they would follow them. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we obviously did a lot of controls to kind
Speaker 1: of make sure that you know, as as one does
Speaker 1: in science, to make sure that they're not inherently afraid
Speaker 1: of these maths, that they don't inherently start not coming
Speaker 1: to food after periods of time, Right, Like if Michael
Speaker 1: Myers doesn't hold up a dead crow to them but
Speaker 1: only feeds them Cheetos, they're not going to freak out.
Speaker 1: They're not going to freak out. And I did that.
Speaker 1: I literally did that experiment, so I could say that
Speaker 1: for sure if Michael Myers or like creepy clowns were
Speaker 1: only scared of them, because we associate that kind of
Speaker 1: thing with like, oh, then they stab us. But if
Speaker 1: they just offer us cheetos all the time and they're
Speaker 1: pretty chill, you know, we're not gonna uh, we're not
Speaker 1: going to be scared of them. And the same thing
Speaker 1: the same thing with crows, it seems, which is really excellent. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean it's I love that crows have good horror
Speaker 1: movie survival instincts, Like you know what I mean, you
Speaker 1: watch a horror movie. A lot of the characters in
Speaker 1: a horror movie just have the worst instincts, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I saw a man wearing like a leather face, Uh,
Speaker 1: maybe I follow him, you know, just like, oh, there's
Speaker 1: there's someone covered in blood. I'll go down the stairs
Speaker 1: into the basement to see what they're up to. Like now,
Speaker 1: these crows, like I will call for any reinforcements or
Speaker 1: anything like that. I'm just gonna go. Yeah. Now, crows
Speaker 1: are are very adapt at calling for reinforcements when they
Speaker 1: think something nefarious is a foot right, and that that
Speaker 1: is what we were able to show. So the visually,
Speaker 1: the kind of set up for this, just so your
Speaker 1: listeners can picture it a little better. Is so my
Speaker 1: role I was lucky and that I never was the target.
Speaker 1: So I was kind of the the nice, benevolent feeder.
Speaker 1: I would I would show up with my little clipboard
Speaker 1: and my camera on a tripod and I would put
Speaker 1: the food out. So at first they'd see me in
Speaker 1: that context. Where are you wearing a mask for that
Speaker 1: as well? Or I wasn't. I was just myself for
Speaker 1: that cool. So like now they are like, hey, it's Kayleie,
Speaker 1: like she's a friend of crows, and yes it is.
Speaker 1: That's how I met my best crow friend. Go I
Speaker 1: actually go the crow yep, Because I I couldn't, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't engage in any supplementary feeding when the experiment
Speaker 1: was going on, like I could only feed them in
Speaker 1: that context. But then once it was done, then it
Speaker 1: could be you know, all once the study is over,
Speaker 1: is it ethical to become friends with your participants if
Speaker 1: the participant is a crow? Yes, the answer is yes,
Speaker 1: and I did. Um. So I was always kind of
Speaker 1: standing there, you know, with my my camera and my clipboard,
Speaker 1: and then I would have volunteers come and they would be,
Speaker 1: you know, my my sort of like murderers, sort as
Speaker 1: big they put the masks on and all of that,
Speaker 1: and just as a way of sort of keeping and
Speaker 1: collecting data, even just as it related to how quickly
Speaker 1: the crows would come to the food. Outside of you know,
Speaker 1: the main funeral day, I always had that tripod and
Speaker 1: that seemed to be the thing that really caught a
Speaker 1: lot of people's attention. Actually, So you know, we we
Speaker 1: ran into a fair number shenanigans during the funeral experiments
Speaker 1: where we would have upset homeowners. I mean, you guys
Speaker 1: were wearing like serial killer masks holding up dead crows
Speaker 1: while we had to sign Katie, as you said, we
Speaker 1: had those signs. Yeah, I mean, if someone's like has
Speaker 1: like a big bloody knife and like a crazy clown mask.
Speaker 1: But they have a sign like do not be alarmed
Speaker 1: clown study. I'll instantly relax. It'll be fine, of course,
Speaker 1: of course. Yeah, no, I I can't blame you, and
Speaker 1: you know I couldn't. I didn't blame people at the
Speaker 1: time either. I think, um, people absolutely have a right
Speaker 1: to be curious. Uh and aware. Did you ever get
Speaker 1: the cops called on you? I did frequently, actually, yeah,
Speaker 1: And they eventually they would kind of be like, are
Speaker 1: you dumb one of those people, and I'll be like,
Speaker 1: and then you just sort of take my name and
Speaker 1: and there was a few times. My favorite was I
Speaker 1: was doing one of these near Magnusent Park, which is
Speaker 1: a pretty big park in Seattle, well known. And again
Speaker 1: like I have my my volunteer, and this particular volunteer
Speaker 1: got me in the trouble the most because Joel, he
Speaker 1: was a sweetheart. He actually ended up taking a taxidermy
Speaker 1: class and being my main taxidermist for the rest of
Speaker 1: my studies. He was invaluable. But he's like six, like nine,
Speaker 1: it's just a huge dude. Uh. And he he really
Speaker 1: likes or at the time he would wear like kind
Speaker 1: of mostly black and camma, and so seeing him in
Speaker 1: one of those masks really freaked people out. And I
Speaker 1: remember we were doing one of these studies near Magnazine
Speaker 1: and this old, older woman came up to me and
Speaker 1: she was like, you know, demanding to know what are
Speaker 1: you doing. And so I explained, you know, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: a researcher with you, dub. We're doing this experiment. And
Speaker 1: that was one of the tests that involved also a
Speaker 1: stuffed redtail hawk. So there was a redtail hawk on
Speaker 1: the ground not far from well. The hawks actually were
Speaker 1: like lifelike mounts um so they're they're even more sort
Speaker 1: of conspicuous because they're kind of standing right. And so
Speaker 1: I'm pointing all this stuff out and I have my clipboard.
Speaker 1: It's full of data. You know, we've got our signs on,
Speaker 1: I have a tripod. And I finished explaining it to
Speaker 1: her and she goes, I don't believe you. I'm selling
Speaker 1: the cops. It's just like, wow, what an elaborate ruse.
Speaker 1: Can you act? We had just made all that up,
Speaker 1: and so, you know, it was it was never a
Speaker 1: big deal. I mean, like, do you think like Satanists
Speaker 1: really have like a printed out Excel spreadsheet, Like is
Speaker 1: that I mean, I maybe, look, I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: I think the actual Church of Satan is pretty pretty chill,
Speaker 1: Like there's like an actual Church of Satan and they're
Speaker 1: mostly their thing is like I think religious freedom. We
Speaker 1: have freedom, freedom of speech. Yeah, and just making sure
Speaker 1: that I'm sure they are like actual practicing occultists who
Speaker 1: uh who like a spreadsheet. So I don't want to generalize,
Speaker 1: but I think typically I don't, I don't know. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: right to me, if you're into the occult and like
Speaker 1: you like to be organized and you have spreadsheets and
Speaker 1: data and you run q Q plots, like, let me
Speaker 1: know if that's the whole thing in acol, let me
Speaker 1: know to find that, just so I can s to,
Speaker 1: you know, craft this description more accurately. We had a
Speaker 1: lot of sort of funny run ins and and I
Speaker 1: but I do like to always sort of take a
Speaker 1: moment to appreciate that, you know, for me, those stories
Speaker 1: of being out in the field and having the cops
Speaker 1: called and them coming and asking a few questions is
Speaker 1: something that you know was never sort of threatening and
Speaker 1: I can laugh about now, but recognizing that that's absolutely
Speaker 1: not true for a lot of people, particularly people of color,
Speaker 1: and that really sucks. It sucks for me to imagine
Speaker 1: that my whiteness made doing this research possible in a
Speaker 1: way that I might not have otherwise. And so I
Speaker 1: like to laugh about these stories, but I am careful.
Speaker 1: I try and be careful of recognizing that there's lots
Speaker 1: of contexts where those stories wouldn't be funny at all,
Speaker 1: and that's something we need to work on. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's the black Birders movement that I definitely
Speaker 1: encourage people to check out on Twitter because in the
Speaker 1: wake of the Central Park in it where a black birder,
Speaker 1: Christian Cooper, was threatened by this white lady who said
Speaker 1: that she would call the cops on him and specifically
Speaker 1: tell them that he's black. She was clearly using the
Speaker 1: cops to threaten his safety and intimidate them just because
Speaker 1: he asked her to put her dog on a leash.
Speaker 1: Another thing, don't have your dogs off leash, guys, because
Speaker 1: that's really bad for birds or cats or cats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: cats are bad too, they like to eat birds. Just
Speaker 1: keep your keep your pets up. I love cats and dogs,
Speaker 1: but not great for birds. So keep them in check
Speaker 1: there and this guy was just asking her to put
Speaker 1: her dog on leash and she called the cops on
Speaker 1: him instead, which, as we know in this country isn't
Speaker 1: actual can threaten your life if you are a person
Speaker 1: of color. So I think that, yeah, it is. It
Speaker 1: is interesting where it's like it does. It's like it's
Speaker 1: sort of you guys can get away with a lot
Speaker 1: of occult seeming stuff through through privilege and warranted a
Speaker 1: number of pretty strange and funny questions, from Accolt to
Speaker 1: Pokemon Go and everything in between. There are people will
Speaker 1: make up all kinds of stories when they say a
Speaker 1: person with a camera and they're just judging you based
Speaker 1: on the fact that you have a camera. There are
Speaker 1: people in masks holding dead crows. It's very judgmental. It's
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know where people get off this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. Let's play another round of auditory guests
Speaker 1: that Corvid, who do you suppose this is? That's a
Speaker 1: carrion crow from the weather All Animal Rescue in the
Speaker 1: UK saying hello. When we return, We're going to find
Speaker 1: out how smart Corvid's really are. If I told you
Speaker 1: this was a crow call, would you believe me. Well,
Speaker 1: it certainly is, but it's no common crow or care
Speaker 1: arian crow. It's the call of a new Caledonian crow
Speaker 1: who happened to have quite a few tricks up their
Speaker 1: sleeves or feathers. So we talked about your what it's
Speaker 1: like to have done your crow funeral research, and how
Speaker 1: it showed that they were able to learn people's faces.
Speaker 1: We already knew that, but they were also able to
Speaker 1: identify those faces as being dangerous, like they they responded differently.
Speaker 1: If you're holding up the dead crow, they would freak
Speaker 1: out there like this person is potentially dangerous. And they
Speaker 1: also treated the location as a potential danger and were
Speaker 1: more careful next time they came by. Even the allure
Speaker 1: of cheetahs was not enough to get them to come
Speaker 1: by without some caution. Yeah, and that, and that was
Speaker 1: an important distinction because it would have actually been awesome
Speaker 1: if um, the funeral event was enough to get them
Speaker 1: to be like, Nope, I'm out of here, no peanuts
Speaker 1: or cheetos from me. That would have lended itself to
Speaker 1: a really easy see a useful management tool if there
Speaker 1: are if there were situations, say you know where they've
Speaker 1: been depredating on a sensitive species. If we could just
Speaker 1: hang one of these for half an hour and take
Speaker 1: it down and the crow stopped coming by, that would
Speaker 1: be awesome. If scarecrows really worked, I don't think. I
Speaker 1: think we would have solved that problem a long time ago.
Speaker 1: That is absolutely true. So, yeah, it wasn't enough to
Speaker 1: get them to completely evacuate, but they were cautious. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you think that they can actually mourn their dead
Speaker 1: or is it purely a survival instinct or is that
Speaker 1: is even that distinction sort of fuzzy because it makes
Speaker 1: me wonder like if our original like our mourning and
Speaker 1: our fear of death and our sort of ritual around
Speaker 1: death has something to do with self preservation that gets
Speaker 1: extended into sort of these deep emotional places. So, just
Speaker 1: from from your sort of observed asians, like, do you
Speaker 1: think crows have like a a sense of death and
Speaker 1: a sense of morning or do you think it is
Speaker 1: that distinction hard to make at this point. I don't know,
Speaker 1: and I'm really comfortable not knowing the answer to that question.
Speaker 1: I think that we can be very confident that crows
Speaker 1: use dead crows as a queue of risk and as
Speaker 1: a learning opportunity, and I think it makes absolute sense
Speaker 1: that for animals that do have really more ritualistic and
Speaker 1: more emotionally invested responses, that that might have been the impetus,
Speaker 1: right because we didn't go from nothing to you know,
Speaker 1: a New Orleans funeral. There was a lot in between there,
Speaker 1: and so so it makes sense that that first kind
Speaker 1: of attentiveness might come from a place of self preservation.
Speaker 1: But when we look at crows, I mean, these are
Speaker 1: incredibly social animals, they're incredibly intelligent animals. When we look
Speaker 1: at their brains, there's nothing we can point to to say,
Speaker 1: we'll see here their missing this. This is why they
Speaker 1: couldn't have the emotional intelligence of of a primate or
Speaker 1: adulphin or human. They're just missing a chunk of brain
Speaker 1: right there. Just that there's just it's just it's also
Speaker 1: just not how brains work in general, Like you don't
Speaker 1: like you can literally have a chunk of your brain
Speaker 1: taken out and your brain is so it's called neuroplasticity,
Speaker 1: that your brain can reorganize itself, that you actually regain
Speaker 1: some of the abilities in certain cases, not always like
Speaker 1: but you can actually regain abilities that are literally carved
Speaker 1: out of your brain because it is a very complex
Speaker 1: system in terms of evolution. It's true like as you
Speaker 1: get like you, you do get like more additions onto
Speaker 1: your brain, Like you get a prefrontal cortex, which is
Speaker 1: very different from just having like, you know, a very
Speaker 1: simple brain stem ponds madula and blagotta kind of set up.
Speaker 1: But it is once you start to get to be
Speaker 1: like a crow or human and your brain gets more
Speaker 1: and more complex, and you do start to get the
Speaker 1: like these more um kind of like integrated processes, it
Speaker 1: is hard to just be like, uh, see the crow.
Speaker 1: The crow brain is smaller than a human, so it
Speaker 1: has to be dumb. It's just like our brain is
Speaker 1: smaller than um. Like a blue whale. Blue whales have
Speaker 1: a big brand just by volume. It's a huge I
Speaker 1: feel like a blue whales brain is probably about as
Speaker 1: big as like a child, yeah, a whole human child.
Speaker 1: But you know, to say that a blue whale is
Speaker 1: therefore much smarter than us, it's just kind of faulty reasoning.
Speaker 1: It's all about relativity exactly, and humans and dolphins and
Speaker 1: crows have a much bigger brand size relative to our
Speaker 1: body size than we would expect So yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: crow brains. For all of the ways that they are different,
Speaker 1: there isn't anything where we can say, oh, and the
Speaker 1: fact that they're different in this way means that they
Speaker 1: don't possess any kind of emotional intelligence. And at the
Speaker 1: same time, you know, like I said, these are incredibly
Speaker 1: social animals. They forge really long term relationships with one another.
Speaker 1: I can how it would absolutely be valuable and adaptive
Speaker 1: to have emotional commitments to their partners and to their flockmates.
Speaker 1: At the same time, though, you know, having a deep
Speaker 1: emotional investment, you know, we we I always start by
Speaker 1: sort of asking what would be the adaptive value of
Speaker 1: that and going into a long period of mourning. You know,
Speaker 1: if you were a female, for example, you've just lost
Speaker 1: your mate and you go into a long period of
Speaker 1: mourning that precludes you from being able to take a
Speaker 1: new partner and breed, that's probably not super helpful to you.
Speaker 1: Right or morning you're lost, you know, kids for the season.
Speaker 1: If it's early enough that you could attempt to remake
Speaker 1: and lay another clutch, probably not super useful to spend
Speaker 1: a bunch of time being super bummed out. So that's
Speaker 1: why I'm kind of in the spot where you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what they're thinking, but I'm totally open
Speaker 1: to the possibility that we learn that crows are much
Speaker 1: more emotionally aware than than we currently understand about them.
Speaker 1: To that point, I want to talk about some of
Speaker 1: the surprising ways that corvid show intelligence because I think
Speaker 1: we have this sense of like a, you know, like
Speaker 1: humans were the most intelligent, and then like primates are
Speaker 1: really really smart, and then maybe after that like dolphins,
Speaker 1: and then maybe parrots like Alex the parrot was pretty smart.
Speaker 1: I think that people don't realize how incredibly, almost spookily
Speaker 1: intelligent corvids can be. One of the things that like
Speaker 1: we use as sort of this very rough measure of
Speaker 1: intelligence is tool used because like that requires very complicated
Speaker 1: cognition to be able to pick up a thing and
Speaker 1: use it for another task, Like it just requires so
Speaker 1: many kind of parallel processing systems in your brain that
Speaker 1: it indicates some amount of higher cognition. New Caledonian crows
Speaker 1: are really interesting. I think we've talked about them on
Speaker 1: the podcast before, but they look very much like an
Speaker 1: American crow. They are found in New Caledonia, which is
Speaker 1: an archipelago in the southwest Pacific Ocean. I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: this is a question for you. Do you know, like
Speaker 1: if there's a way to be able to distinguish visually
Speaker 1: a New Caledonian crow from an American crow? I do so.
Speaker 1: New Caledonian crows look like they're smiling, and the reason
Speaker 1: for that is actually very much tied to their tool use.
Speaker 1: They have this curve to their bill that gives the
Speaker 1: bottom part of the bill, which is called the lower mandible,
Speaker 1: sort of this like a little bit chalkier appearance, and
Speaker 1: it kind of curves up and that what gives them.
Speaker 1: That's what gives them their sort of smiley appearance. And
Speaker 1: the reason that their bill has that particular shape is
Speaker 1: actually that it's really important in allowing them the dexterity
Speaker 1: that they need to manufacture tools. Gives them a set
Speaker 1: appliers on their faces exactly if you could, like if
Speaker 1: you had clower is on your face, you would also
Speaker 1: be grinning all the time. Or maybe it be horrified.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but crows are very happy about it.
Speaker 1: Right in. These New Caledonian crows, like they love to
Speaker 1: eat grubs and they will use sticks and little any
Speaker 1: stick like tool that they can find to get grubs
Speaker 1: out of wood. And now that like the easiest way
Speaker 1: that they do this is they just take sort of
Speaker 1: a straight stick, they put it in a hole, and
Speaker 1: the grubs will instinctively bite at this intrusion, and then
Speaker 1: they fish it out like catching a fish on a hook,
Speaker 1: because the grub is biting down and they pull it out.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't always work in every circumstance that they
Speaker 1: are looking for grubs, Like the crows will actually take
Speaker 1: one of these sticks and modify it so that it
Speaker 1: works as a better grub extraction tool and can fit
Speaker 1: into different spaces and can pick them up more effectively.
Speaker 1: So they use very like you mentioned with their because
Speaker 1: I didn't know it made them look like they were smiling,
Speaker 1: and that's like the reason that's so cool. But yeah,
Speaker 1: they will use those weeks to do this very precise ripping,
Speaker 1: cutting and bending techniques on the stick to create basically
Speaker 1: these like custom tools to be able to fish out grubs,
Speaker 1: which I think we had previously only seen this in
Speaker 1: like there there was Betty the captive New Caledonian crow,
Speaker 1: so we had seen that in captivity, but it was
Speaker 1: only relatively recently that we saw that they were also
Speaker 1: doing this in the wild, which is really exciting because
Speaker 1: like animals and captivity will behave differently than their counterparts
Speaker 1: in the wild. So to find out that they actually
Speaker 1: do it in the while, just like all these crows
Speaker 1: just making making their little hooks and tools and getting
Speaker 1: the grubs, that's really cool. It is, yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: so so just to give a little bit more background
Speaker 1: on Betty since you brought her up, so Betty was,
Speaker 1: like you said, she was a wild caught New Caledonian crow,
Speaker 1: and we had no prior to Betty that New Caledonian
Speaker 1: crows make tools, and the one we were most familiar
Speaker 1: with was they'll you're off the edges of pandanus leaves,
Speaker 1: and the pandanas plant is a really rigid leaf. Picture
Speaker 1: kind of like like an aloe leaf. It's it's not
Speaker 1: that thick, but picture something rigid and serrated on the edge,
Speaker 1: and so they'll shave off little, you know, the sides
Speaker 1: of them and then they'll, like you say, they'll kind
Speaker 1: of shave them down until they're the right width and length,
Speaker 1: and then they'll stick those in and let the grips grab.
Speaker 1: But our challenge as um animal behaviorists is there's a
Speaker 1: lot of things animals do that can look on its
Speaker 1: surface really sophisticated, but isn't necessarily guided cognitively, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of wit Like antswer a great example.
Speaker 1: Ants did not go and get degrees in engineering school,
Speaker 1: and yet they can build bridges. And it's not because
Speaker 1: they understand physics. It's because each one executes a very
Speaker 1: simple job and when you put that together, you get
Speaker 1: something sophisticated. Right Like at the most base examples, there's
Speaker 1: this I think it's as slimal, but it's very very
Speaker 1: tiny organism that actually creates like each of them come
Speaker 1: together to create a slug, like a multi unit slug
Speaker 1: that's made out of a bunch of individuals, and then
Speaker 1: it creates like when they are on a hostile environment,
Speaker 1: this slug will spontaneously form a stem that reaches up
Speaker 1: like a platform, and the ones at the very top
Speaker 1: are these spores that can then like basically get sent
Speaker 1: off to a better environment. And so it seems like
Speaker 1: they are planning this out like Okay, we're in a
Speaker 1: bad spot right now, we will form this collective and
Speaker 1: then create this stem and then like send off like
Speaker 1: the survivors like astronauts off to a better place, and
Speaker 1: it seems like, oh, they're really all altruistic and planning. No,
Speaker 1: it's all just it's basically piling on behavior that ends
Speaker 1: up turning into what looks like this very complex thing,
Speaker 1: and it's like it really is every one of them
Speaker 1: for itself trying to pile on the other one, similar
Speaker 1: to like how piranhas. It's like, oh, they like to
Speaker 1: take turns eating, carry on. No, they just are all
Speaker 1: kind of like piling on, and once one of them
Speaker 1: gets a mouthful of food, they'll pull back to eat
Speaker 1: the food and get pushed out of the way by
Speaker 1: another piranha who also wants to eat the food. So
Speaker 1: it's like intelligent behavior can just be crowd behavior that's
Speaker 1: like totally self driven, not altruistic at all, not no
Speaker 1: forethought at all, just a little what it looks like
Speaker 1: automaton doing a single behavior, but then when you get
Speaker 1: a bunch of them together or and then you can
Speaker 1: kind of extrapolate that to an actual animal, like just
Speaker 1: doing trial and air over and over again. But it's
Speaker 1: just one behavior that they repeat and repeat and repeat.
Speaker 1: But it's not they're not really thinking it through exactly.
Speaker 1: So the experiment with Betty was, Okay, how much does
Speaker 1: she really understand why the tool she needs works. So
Speaker 1: what they presented Betty and they did this experiment in pairs.
Speaker 1: So there was Betty and there was actually a second
Speaker 1: bird in the cage with her, and they would give
Speaker 1: them this little cylinder and at the bottom of the
Speaker 1: cylinder was a little bucket of food. And it's too
Speaker 1: far down and too narrow for the crows to actually
Speaker 1: stick their heads in and pick up the bucket. So
Speaker 1: they presented them with two tool options. One was a
Speaker 1: hook and one was a straight piece of wire, and
Speaker 1: and um, this was the first time that Betty and
Speaker 1: her cage mate, as far as I know, had been
Speaker 1: presented with those particular materials. And so clearly the goal
Speaker 1: is can they assess that the correct tool for that
Speaker 1: job is the hook. Unfortunately for the Peru, Betty and
Speaker 1: the researchers at the time, or initially her cage mate
Speaker 1: picked up the hook and then flew away and was like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to do this stupid experiment. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go sit in the corner with my hook. And so
Speaker 1: the researchers I'm sure are like that. Turls are always
Speaker 1: kind of screwing up our experiments, and now you know,
Speaker 1: what are we gonna do? And her Betty, she's hungry
Speaker 1: and she has this wired there's a great view, you
Speaker 1: can google it. And she's poking at the food at
Speaker 1: the bottom and it's not working. And then she sort
Speaker 1: of takes her hook and she pins it to the
Speaker 1: bottom of the cylinder and she starts wrapping it around
Speaker 1: and book up pups. Betty with a pook that she
Speaker 1: has just spontaneously made, which was not even what the
Speaker 1: study was about, because they just wasn't they wanted to
Speaker 1: see if they could distinguish, like if they could see like, okay,
Speaker 1: the straight one doesn't work, I have to use the hook.
Speaker 1: They weren't looking to see if they'd make their own hook.
Speaker 1: And Betty's like, pulls down my bird seed exactly. So
Speaker 1: then she fishes down in there, she pulls out the bucket,
Speaker 1: and like you said, we were like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: don not only does she get it, but she actual
Speaker 1: spontaneously made it. But then, as you said, more recently,
Speaker 1: we put little backpacks with cameras on New Caledonian crows
Speaker 1: and we sent them off, and we realized they freaking
Speaker 1: make hooks all the time. And I just want to
Speaker 1: take moment because this is really significant. So when it
Speaker 1: comes to tools, tools and animals, the first thing to
Speaker 1: understand is that, yes, using tools is rare. Less than
Speaker 1: one percent of all of the animals on planet Earth
Speaker 1: used tools. However, that one percent comprises a huge diversity
Speaker 1: of organisms. So you have animals like chimpanzees and people,
Speaker 1: well you also have like fish there and sea otters,
Speaker 1: animals that you know are are using an object for
Speaker 1: an you know, a sort of a novel purpose to
Speaker 1: benefit them, right, And like woodpecker finches are I don't
Speaker 1: want to be mean to them, but an arguably much
Speaker 1: less intelligent bird that also uses a twig or a
Speaker 1: cactus spine to basically impale a grub. But there's no
Speaker 1: evidence that shows that they really fully understand like how
Speaker 1: the tool works, other than just like I take this thing,
Speaker 1: I stick it in, I get a thing out. Um. Again,
Speaker 1: that's sort of more like what we're talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: where I mean, rats are pretty intelligent, but you can
Speaker 1: train them to press a lever and receive some reward
Speaker 1: that doesn't necessarily mean that they understand the mechanics of
Speaker 1: a lever, like how that lever works. Similarly, you can
Speaker 1: We've studied chimpanzees and we see that they actually make
Speaker 1: a pretty complex physics calculation when they are using a
Speaker 1: tool like to reach something. But when we've tested them
Speaker 1: to see if they have an understanding of math, absolutely not.
Speaker 1: They do not have an understanding of math. So just
Speaker 1: because they have an innate understanding of physics, like a baby,
Speaker 1: like a human baby, I keep jumping from animal to
Speaker 1: animal to animals. But again, like a human baby actually
Speaker 1: has an innate understanding of physics. You have. You show
Speaker 1: a baby a little ball roll up to a big ball,
Speaker 1: and the baby expects like the little ball to just
Speaker 1: kind of like bounce off the big ball and not
Speaker 1: move the big ball because it has this understanding. If
Speaker 1: you show a baby a little ball roll into a
Speaker 1: big ball and it flies away, the baby stares at
Speaker 1: it because it's little mind is blone, because it's like
Speaker 1: I was not expecting that. The baby doesn't have a
Speaker 1: physics degree. The baby doesn't understand anything about conservation of momentum.
Speaker 1: The baby has an innate, kind of instinctive understanding of
Speaker 1: certain physics that is sort of built into its brain,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't have an understanding, a meta cognition of it.
Speaker 1: So when an animal uses a tool and shows a
Speaker 1: meta cognition of it, where it's like it not only
Speaker 1: uses the tool, it understands why certain tools work and
Speaker 1: why other tools don't, and like what it needs to
Speaker 1: do to modify that tool to get it to work.
Speaker 1: That's so exciting because that shows much more cognition than
Speaker 1: you know, simply like I have a stick and when
Speaker 1: I jam the stick over and over sometimes yea food time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so that's the distinction I really like to drive
Speaker 1: home to people is yes, a very few number of
Speaker 1: species use tools, but there are there's very levels of
Speaker 1: understanding in terms of how those animals actually cognitively understand
Speaker 1: these tools. But then the next step and the reason
Speaker 1: why New Caledonian crows have a stop dead in our
Speaker 1: tracks are there are only two animals that make tools,
Speaker 1: and that's a huge cognitively using tools and making tools.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of that um like what you were saying,
Speaker 1: that ability to actually have the intuition of how do
Speaker 1: I modify something for a very specific task that is
Speaker 1: much more challenging, and chimpanzees do it right, And the
Speaker 1: two animals are primates and and the crows right. And
Speaker 1: I think I'm waiting for primatologists to correct me on this,
Speaker 1: but I think chimpanzees are the only primates that make
Speaker 1: tools in the wild. I think there's some evidence of
Speaker 1: other primates like orangutans being able to modify things in
Speaker 1: captive settings. They don't. Yeah, Orientans like model it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily a tool. It's like they make a bed and
Speaker 1: they will modify branches to create a foundation for the
Speaker 1: bed in a kind of specific way. And I think
Speaker 1: that it starts to get like a little bit fuzzy,
Speaker 1: like is that an actual tool, because they're not then
Speaker 1: using that bed to get another thing. They're just birds
Speaker 1: make beds. So it's really special that this a bird,
Speaker 1: this animal that is, like you said, a dinosaur, is
Speaker 1: so different from us in you know, so many ways,
Speaker 1: is doing something that is incredibly unique and cognitively advanced.
Speaker 1: Because that is a level of insight and understanding that
Speaker 1: we should all be watching our backs around the crows
Speaker 1: because it is impressive, especially you, because you had a
Speaker 1: whole study where you're like, hey, here's a dead crow. Everybody. See.
Speaker 1: That's why I was always a friendly person, because I
Speaker 1: know I was planted ahead like the crow. I was like,
Speaker 1: I am not going to be making hordes of enemies here.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be like a Kaiser says, a moment where
Speaker 1: they realize you were the mastermind the whole time. But
Speaker 1: another another interesting thing, and I'm actually going to talk
Speaker 1: about the Eurasian magpie. There's some research that suggests that
Speaker 1: Eurasian magpies can possibly recognize themselves in mirrors. Um and
Speaker 1: so this is an whole interesting thing that I have
Speaker 1: very complex opinions about. It's the mirror test. And this
Speaker 1: is the test where you basically plunk something down in
Speaker 1: front of a mirror and you're like, okay, does this
Speaker 1: animal recognize itself in the mirror? And you will put generally,
Speaker 1: how it stands like you put a dot or a
Speaker 1: mark on the animal without them knowing, like they're either
Speaker 1: like sort of sedated, or you do it stealthily so
Speaker 1: they don't know you've put something on them. And you
Speaker 1: have a control group where you have you put a
Speaker 1: dot on them or something, but it's invisible, so it's
Speaker 1: like it's not the feeling of the dot and or mark,
Speaker 1: and then you put them in front of a mirror
Speaker 1: and then you see if they like look in the
Speaker 1: mirror and they see the mark in the mirror and
Speaker 1: then recognize, oh, that's on me, and then try to
Speaker 1: remove it. I mean, I'll get in more about my
Speaker 1: opinions about this test later, but it's an interesting kind
Speaker 1: of human centric way of thinking about metacognition, Like we
Speaker 1: recognize ourselves. We see ourselves in the mirror, we recognize
Speaker 1: that as us, and then therefore you know, we have
Speaker 1: a self awareness, which I think it may be a
Speaker 1: little more complex than that. But in terms of animals
Speaker 1: who have quote unquote past the mirror test includes obviously humans, chimpanzees, dolphins,
Speaker 1: and elephants. There's a little bit of fuzziness here because
Speaker 1: you'll have some individuals that do it, and then but
Speaker 1: then you try other other animals in the same species
Speaker 1: and then they won't do it. So it's kind of
Speaker 1: a from individual to individual. But when studied, Eurasian magpies
Speaker 1: also seemed to pass this test. So when colorful stickers
Speaker 1: are put on their throats and in the same setup
Speaker 1: that I described before, and they see themselves in the mirror.
Speaker 1: They scratched at their next to try to remove the stickers,
Speaker 1: which indicates that they have some awareness of like there
Speaker 1: having some control over their body and then recognizing it
Speaker 1: in the mirror. But one thing that I think is
Speaker 1: interesting to me about this is we've tested it in
Speaker 1: a lot of like very social animals, like very highly
Speaker 1: socially emotionally intelligent animals like chimpanzees, elephants, dolphins, and and
Speaker 1: then these magpies, like they're all very socially minded. I
Speaker 1: wonder your opinion on on this test, and because I
Speaker 1: think sometimes people jump to the conclusion that, oh, if
Speaker 1: they can recognize themselves in the mirror, they have this
Speaker 1: concept of self whereas like, how how much of it
Speaker 1: is them recognizing themselves in the mirror, and how much
Speaker 1: of it is and under just a simple understanding of
Speaker 1: like the physics of a reflection, how much of it
Speaker 1: is like a self awareness do you think or is there?
Speaker 1: Because I'm curious to know if there have been studies
Speaker 1: to see like how they respond not to a mirror
Speaker 1: but just too like one of their cohorts, like another
Speaker 1: bird with that mark in the same place as their own. Like,
Speaker 1: do they just have very advanced like mirror neurons where
Speaker 1: they like they think that the image is another bird,
Speaker 1: but then they're so sympathetic to that they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I better check my neck to kind of thing. So
Speaker 1: I was wondering what your opinion is on all of this,
Speaker 1: So I um, I'm with you, Katie, and that people.
Speaker 1: I often find myself confronted with people who are really
Speaker 1: excited about the mirror tests, who are really excited that
Speaker 1: these Eurasian magpies passed. And I always feel like in
Speaker 1: the Debbi downer because number one, because when we say
Speaker 1: they passed, we mean that too. There was two birds
Speaker 1: that fast the mirror desk is not a great sample
Speaker 1: side being his birds. And then they actually ended up
Speaker 1: trying to repeat this study in jackdaws and they did
Speaker 1: it the exact name ways, and jackdaws are another corvid,
Speaker 1: you know, they're another bird in the corvid family. They
Speaker 1: used to be in the Corvius genus, but we just
Speaker 1: kicked them out and they did the exact name studies
Speaker 1: and in those birds, even the control birds picked up
Speaker 1: on the spots, which suggests that maybe those magpies had
Speaker 1: a little bit more tactile sensory awareness of these than
Speaker 1: than it showed. We've also done this study mirror tests
Speaker 1: in New Caledonian crows, and New Caledonian crows are terrible
Speaker 1: at it. Parrots are terrible at it. Anybody who in
Speaker 1: the springtime has had a crow or a raven attacking
Speaker 1: their side mirror in their car or their the windows
Speaker 1: in their house probably are very familiar with the fact
Speaker 1: that by and large these birds are actually really bad
Speaker 1: at it. But what's really interesting and gets that one
Speaker 1: of the questions you asked new it's not at least
Speaker 1: in New Caledonian crows because they don't understand mirrors conceptually.
Speaker 1: So New Caledonian crows can use mirrors to understand that
Speaker 1: something they see in a mirror is actually happening behind them.
Speaker 1: Oh that's so interesting, right, So they seem to understand
Speaker 1: the properties of a mirror. So maybe it is just
Speaker 1: a very sort of like anthrocentric, you know, because we
Speaker 1: express self directed behaviors, you know, trying to look. So
Speaker 1: the main things that when we put animals in front
Speaker 1: of mirrors, the themes we see in terms of self
Speaker 1: directed behaviors are we want to look at our mouths,
Speaker 1: and we want to look at our genitals, the two
Speaker 1: areas that we that we have a hard time investigating otherwise.
Speaker 1: And that's what dolphins do, that's what primates do. That's
Speaker 1: maybe that's what's going on with all these zoom called shenanigans.
Speaker 1: But you know, birds only have the one hole and
Speaker 1: it's covered with feathers generally, and their mouths aren't that
Speaker 1: exciting something. You know, maybe they just aren't that interest
Speaker 1: did in those self directed behaviors. But there was a
Speaker 1: study that just came out a few weeks ago that
Speaker 1: took a very different approach to try and tease out consciousness.
Speaker 1: They went right to the source. They went right to
Speaker 1: the brain to look at how the brain responded to
Speaker 1: these these different kinds of scenarios they were getting at.
Speaker 1: And based on the timing of when these neurons were firing,
Speaker 1: they were able to pretty convincingly show that they weren't
Speaker 1: just responding in kind of an automatic way when they're
Speaker 1: in front of a mirror. No. So this this left
Speaker 1: the mirror completely out of it. It had them trained
Speaker 1: so that they knew if they saw lights to pack,
Speaker 1: and then they gave them a series where the lights
Speaker 1: were sometimes really faint and sometimes really bright, and they
Speaker 1: looked at what their brains were doing when they were
Speaker 1: presented with these faint lights, and based on kind of
Speaker 1: the timing of when the neurons fired and whether or
Speaker 1: not they fired, they were able to ascertain that actually
Speaker 1: they were basically showing what we call a subjective consciousness.
Speaker 1: They were really sort of like they were experiencing the
Speaker 1: brightness of light right in a way that suggested a
Speaker 1: conscious appreciation of it and not just like a reactionary
Speaker 1: appreciation of it. It was a pretty complex study. I'm
Speaker 1: hoping to write about it for my blog. I've reached
Speaker 1: out to the folks that ran it, because I tell
Speaker 1: you what, I read that study like twice and so
Speaker 1: much of it just went right over my head, and
Speaker 1: I've already got like questions, Yeah, right, it's it's a
Speaker 1: complicated study for the listeners. I think one thing to
Speaker 1: point out is that you can have an organism react
Speaker 1: to light like a stimulus. Like you can have a nematode,
Speaker 1: which is as close to having no brain as you
Speaker 1: can get almost with an animal, and a nematode will
Speaker 1: react to light. It has a very very primitive eye
Speaker 1: spot that can react to light and dark, and and
Speaker 1: it will react light, that doesn't mean it experiences the light.
Speaker 1: When you look, you know, any one of us, like
Speaker 1: looks at outside at the light, or you you look
Speaker 1: at a TV screen and you see these lights, you
Speaker 1: have all these sort of automated reaction to the light
Speaker 1: where your people constricts, but you also have a conscious
Speaker 1: experience of light. And quantifying that in animals is really
Speaker 1: really hard because we don't even know how to quantify
Speaker 1: consciousness and humans yet other than just being assured that
Speaker 1: another person is saying like, hey, I do experience seeing
Speaker 1: the light, and you just got to trust them because
Speaker 1: you can't get inside their head. So it is really interesting.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm really interested to see more about this study
Speaker 1: because like being able to show that like there are
Speaker 1: parts of the brain that light up basically when you're
Speaker 1: when you're having sort of a not just an immediate
Speaker 1: risk sponse, but an actual sort of experience of like
Speaker 1: of the quality is like pretty crazy. Yeah. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: so that's probably going to be a much better bet
Speaker 1: than the mirror tests at addressing consciousness and birds because
Speaker 1: we just have such a mixed bag of results with
Speaker 1: these mirror tests, and you know, maybe it's just not
Speaker 1: a relevant way for these animals, you know, for every
Speaker 1: animal to demonstrate that it has a sense of self.
Speaker 1: It's it's something where I think some of these tests
Speaker 1: that like we're trying to see whether an animal is
Speaker 1: intelligent or conscious is really very human egocentric. Like we're
Speaker 1: just so like, oh, it's got to be it's got
Speaker 1: to think like a human to have that self awareness.
Speaker 1: And I'm not sure that's true. Yeah, And that is
Speaker 1: definitely our challenge, right as objective as we try and
Speaker 1: be a scientist, we are ultimately you know, limited by
Speaker 1: our our own lens and our imaginations for how we
Speaker 1: can ask questions, and our imaginations are very much sort
Speaker 1: of influenced by our human nous and and culturally too, right,
Speaker 1: so how somebody in one part of the world and
Speaker 1: from one culture may approach that question might be really
Speaker 1: different than somebody else, Which is a great reason to
Speaker 1: want to really expand, um the kinds of representations and science,
Speaker 1: because being able to bring a lot of different styles
Speaker 1: of thinking into the room is really helpful because collectively,
Speaker 1: you know, we we need that because we are already
Speaker 1: limited as people, absolutely and also just this is another
Speaker 1: thing I like to talk about on the show, is
Speaker 1: looking into cultural history and not having a sort of
Speaker 1: snobbery of like, oh, you know, as scientists, we can
Speaker 1: never listen to um sort of like folklore or other
Speaker 1: cultures because that's unscientific. It's like, well, it may not
Speaker 1: be enough for a study. But when you actually look
Speaker 1: into things like anecdotal observations of birds of prey, like
Speaker 1: in Australia picking up sticks and setting fires, we don't
Speaker 1: have we have. I don't think there's been a definitive
Speaker 1: study proving that yet. But if we had just ignored
Speaker 1: aboriginal observations and like, no, there's no way a bird
Speaker 1: would be smart enough to set fire like or intentionally
Speaker 1: spread fire, then we may not have opened up this
Speaker 1: whole avenue of research of like, hey, actually, there's a
Speaker 1: chance that these birds are intentionally or not spreading fire
Speaker 1: by picking up twigs from a wildfire somewhere else and
Speaker 1: then spreading it to somewhere else and then reaping the
Speaker 1: rewards by chasing all the prey items that are fleeing.
Speaker 1: And so I think, yeah, definitely, when we close our
Speaker 1: ears and eyes to other perspectives, other human perspectives were
Speaker 1: really shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to
Speaker 1: scientific research. And I say that as a podcaster who
Speaker 1: doesn't do research, scolding you're scientists. It's absolutely true, and
Speaker 1: you know, it's very relevant to the funeral stuff. We
Speaker 1: were you know, what we were doing was asking very
Speaker 1: specific novel questions, but the idea that corvids respond strongly
Speaker 1: to their dead, we were absolutely not even close to
Speaker 1: the first people to to discuss that. You can find
Speaker 1: stories about it in the Koran for example. I mean,
Speaker 1: human beings as as a species collectively have been very
Speaker 1: aware of this, uh and it it's you know, it's
Speaker 1: a pretty harmful, very colonialist approach to ignore traditional knowledge
Speaker 1: and then claim discovery, and we repeat things that have
Speaker 1: been around for years. So it's really important for us
Speaker 1: to to listen to those sources of traditional knowledge and
Speaker 1: to you know, give them credit as amazing naturalists and
Speaker 1: as really important sources of information. When there is that
Speaker 1: kind of overlap between that cultural knowledge and then when
Speaker 1: it meets how we may be scientifically want to parse
Speaker 1: a particular question. We are always using old assumptions and
Speaker 1: old information that we have in order to build the
Speaker 1: questions that we can actually scientifically quantify. So it's why
Speaker 1: would we ignore anybody of knowledge just because oh, well
Speaker 1: this hasn't you know, this isn't like scientifics like well no,
Speaker 1: but neither is a bunch of other assumptions that we
Speaker 1: make about nature that hasn't been parsed and picked apart
Speaker 1: by actual experimentations and actual research observations. It makes me
Speaker 1: think about too, like our cultural understanding of crows and
Speaker 1: ravens and other corvid's, because I think we have this
Speaker 1: sense of them, Oh they're kind of spooky and they're
Speaker 1: bad omens, and that's been such a prominent thing, like
Speaker 1: you know, especially in the West, like this idea that
Speaker 1: like crows and ravens are our omens or or evil
Speaker 1: or occult, like people thinking that you're doing some occult
Speaker 1: business because I mean, to be fair, are having a
Speaker 1: dead crow is a little little fuff, little fun, but
Speaker 1: it is when you actually look into it, Uh, there
Speaker 1: are that is not the universal cultural depiction of crows
Speaker 1: or ravens at all. In fact, in a lot of
Speaker 1: cultures they are seen as they can be highly intelligent,
Speaker 1: they can be like in myths like as like highly
Speaker 1: intelligent like tricksters or or thinkers. They can be um
Speaker 1: you know, actually the opposite, like good omens signs of
Speaker 1: abundance and of of good luck. It's not necessarily separated
Speaker 1: by like region, because like corvids are a cosmopolitan species,
Speaker 1: are found all over the world, you know, from China
Speaker 1: to ancient Celtic culture. Crows were actually good, Like they
Speaker 1: were good omens. They weren't necessarily negative. You know. I
Speaker 1: think obviously we we appreciate crows now and I think
Speaker 1: they're they're not as maligned these days as they used
Speaker 1: to be. But it is something to consider when it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, you imagine if we had only relied on
Speaker 1: one cultural understanding of crows and an unchanging idea that
Speaker 1: they're that they're bad and evil, like, we would never
Speaker 1: find out how intelligent and and amazing and emotionally deep
Speaker 1: that they are. Yeah, it's one of my favorite things
Speaker 1: about crows is because of their proximity to us and
Speaker 1: their cosmopolitan nous, they are really incorporated into the mythology
Speaker 1: and the creation stories of almost all peoples around the world.
Speaker 1: And it's pretty you know, I don't look at it
Speaker 1: as a bad thing that they have really different reputations
Speaker 1: depending on where in the world they are. I think
Speaker 1: it's a really interesting aspect of them that, like you mentioned,
Speaker 1: you know, in ancient Greece they were symbols of love.
Speaker 1: In China, they were symbols of prophecy and luck. In
Speaker 1: Hiata storytelling traditions, which is a tribe in the Coast
Speaker 1: Salish read gen they were ravens were ultimate creators. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's it's just really amazing how much humans and
Speaker 1: corvids are sort of inextricably linked, and the way that
Speaker 1: we've really used them to understand and tell stories about
Speaker 1: how the world came to be and what it means.
Speaker 1: Often when we think about our relations to animals, we
Speaker 1: think about um domesticated animals or pets, not necessarily animals
Speaker 1: that we haven't domesticated that are not pets, you know,
Speaker 1: as cool as they are as cool any bird caretaker
Speaker 1: will tell you that ravens and crows do not make
Speaker 1: good pets. They are they're not. They are very cute.
Speaker 1: Of course, everyone would love to have a fun friend
Speaker 1: and a pet raven, but it's they just are too.
Speaker 1: They're so strong willed, like they have they have their
Speaker 1: own thing going on. They want to do their own stuff.
Speaker 1: They don't really want to they they're very intelligent, and
Speaker 1: you think, well, then that means they can be an
Speaker 1: untrainable animal. Is not an unintelligent animal. It's one that
Speaker 1: sees no reason to meet drains exactly. Yeah, And crows
Speaker 1: and ravens really are in terms of pet pets are
Speaker 1: really just sort of two year olds, kind of at
Speaker 1: their most candy hopped up moment, but that can fly
Speaker 1: and are smarter and never grow out of it. And
Speaker 1: sharp clause and I'm sharp clause. Maybe not as much
Speaker 1: as a raptor, but you know, they can make you
Speaker 1: bleed to believe you me so yeah, not not good
Speaker 1: for pets. Not good for pets. The wonderful thing is
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter because wild birds are generally speaking, very
Speaker 1: open to companionships. And it will have a few more boundaries,
Speaker 1: but those boundaries keep everybody safer. But you can still
Speaker 1: have these really wonderful and intimate relationships with wild birds
Speaker 1: where they learned to recognize you and come with you,
Speaker 1: and they maybe even bring you presence every once in
Speaker 1: a while. I saw I saw it. It was so
Speaker 1: funny because I was actually looking through Snopes because I
Speaker 1: was trying to find if there were some chrow myths
Speaker 1: that we should debunk, and I decided not to do that.
Speaker 1: But I found this article about someone who was thought
Speaker 1: that they were getting presents from from some I think
Speaker 1: it was crows, like a little some pine or was
Speaker 1: it the pop can? It was the pop lids on
Speaker 1: the the soda can lids on the And guess who
Speaker 1: was interviewed in the article I saw you was like, hey,
Speaker 1: whole circle to find out if they were actually because
Speaker 1: the person was saying, like, well, we'll leave out food
Speaker 1: for them, and like, you know, we seem to have
Speaker 1: this they really are interested in what our kids are
Speaker 1: doing and they have this friendly relationship. And then they
Speaker 1: left these pine fronds like stuck in a tab like
Speaker 1: that you'd get off of a soda can and then
Speaker 1: just like left them there, and like are they making
Speaker 1: us presents? Uh? And I think like ultimately the answer is,
Speaker 1: like who knows exactly. They definitely leave things behind in
Speaker 1: places where they're routinely fed. The question is is it
Speaker 1: an act of gratitude or is it just that these
Speaker 1: birds are curious and sometimes carry things around and then
Speaker 1: leave them because something better was there that they made.
Speaker 1: All right, So if you trick or treat, which I
Speaker 1: know is curtailed this year because of the pandemic, but like,
Speaker 1: you're not necessarily guaranteed like to be able to go
Speaker 1: trick or treat with a crow, Like they may leave
Speaker 1: you something, or they may just yell at you, or
Speaker 1: they may just yell at you. And I will tell you, Um,
Speaker 1: I have paid friends with many crow in my time,
Speaker 1: and I've I've never gotten a present. So that's my
Speaker 1: main evidence for that. It can't be gratitude. At least
Speaker 1: at least you didn't get a present, if you know
Speaker 1: what I mean on your head a present, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: that that can also And actually, since you brought it up,
Speaker 1: I will just tell people you want to include this
Speaker 1: U to be careful because one of the reasons it
Speaker 1: is important to make boundaries with crows is that every
Speaker 1: once in a while you'll get one that can get
Speaker 1: really aggressive about wanting to get fed, and they will
Speaker 1: come and give you a tap on the head and
Speaker 1: it's not usually enough to cause to break skin, but
Speaker 1: it is scary and it doesn't feel great. So that's
Speaker 1: a good reason. You know that throwing a few peanuts
Speaker 1: here and there. Totally fine most birds, but if you
Speaker 1: see you know, don't don't try and coax these birds
Speaker 1: into hand feeding because once we sort of break down those,
Speaker 1: you know, all of the barriers, if you have a
Speaker 1: hyper aggressive crow, you can end up leading it into
Speaker 1: a situation where it will ultimately be hurt or euthanis
Speaker 1: because it's scaring people. Just just respectful boundaries. It's not
Speaker 1: it's you're not a You're not a Disney princess. Who's
Speaker 1: gonna like have a bunch of crows a light on
Speaker 1: your shoulders without consequently, right, I know, and I've tried,
Speaker 1: so you take it from me, crow expert, that is
Speaker 1: not in anyone's future. I think that's actually a really
Speaker 1: good point because I think it is an important thing
Speaker 1: where I really want to encourage people to enjoy nature
Speaker 1: and not feel afraid, like not feel like, oh, I
Speaker 1: can't interact with nature at all, otherwise I'm gonna ruin
Speaker 1: something or I'm gonna get hurt. Um. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it's just like you know, just there are
Speaker 1: certain boundaries that you need to maintain, like you uh,
Speaker 1: in general, like you know, don't Although we talked about
Speaker 1: the cheetah study. I wouldn't recommend necessarily going out and
Speaker 1: handing cheetos out to crows, as much as they might
Speaker 1: love it, It's not probably the healthiest thing. Kaylee only
Speaker 1: used a light sprinkle for her study, just a light seasoning.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's something that's hard for humans to get comfortable with,
Speaker 1: just co existing with an animal that we can't tame,
Speaker 1: that we can't use, but that can live alongside us
Speaker 1: and be friendly with us, but we can't own. And
Speaker 1: I think we just have to like maybe relax, not
Speaker 1: be such control freaks, just let that relationship be you know,
Speaker 1: just mutual respect. Yeah, exactly. Think of it a little
Speaker 1: bit like approaching a friendship with your boss, right, Like
Speaker 1: you can be the boss. Crow is the boss, right,
Speaker 1: you can be cordial and friendly, you know, d you know,
Speaker 1: a kind gesture here and there, but you know, boundaries
Speaker 1: are important, you don't you don't want to cross too many,
Speaker 1: Like you don't want them like following you on Facebook
Speaker 1: and coming to your house all the time. That would
Speaker 1: be weird. So yeah, so you want to just have
Speaker 1: that nice, friendly relationship, but you also want to be
Speaker 1: able to be like, you know what, but I'm busy
Speaker 1: today and not have it be a thing a polite
Speaker 1: business casual relationship with crows. Right, yes, I love that
Speaker 1: business casual. You have a crow, your business card, payper
Speaker 1: peanut to it, give you your business card, but I
Speaker 1: don't invite it for you know, into your house, right exactly. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining me today, Kaylee. This
Speaker 1: has been amazing. I'm a big fan of your work,
Speaker 1: big fan of crow or you guys. If you're on Twitter,
Speaker 1: you can check out crow or no hashtag crow or
Speaker 1: no where you can test your crow identification skills. And
Speaker 1: but Kaylee is very tricky, so don't trust her. But
Speaker 1: do you have anything to plug? Sure? So people can
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter at corporate research, on Instagram at
Speaker 1: corporate research, on Facebook corporate research, or on my blog.
Speaker 1: I want to guess what it's called, um horse research,
Speaker 1: did you know, Katie? Or the blog corporate research. I
Speaker 1: have a ton of articles. I have articles about you
Speaker 1: know them recognizing themselves in mirrors. I have articles about
Speaker 1: whether or not they kill all the songbirds, all kinds
Speaker 1: of good stuff in there, just anywhere on social media.
Speaker 1: Google corporate research and I'm probably there. We're okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fine to find a If you find a murder
Speaker 1: of Crow's, Kyley's probably behind it all and that you
Speaker 1: can find us as always at Creature feature Pot on
Speaker 1: Instagram at Creature feet Pot on Twitter, that's f e
Speaker 1: A T, not f e T. That is something very different,
Speaker 1: and you can find me on Twitter at Katie Golden
Speaker 1: just for you know, my random Katie thoughts, not always
Speaker 1: about animals, but sometimes about animals as always, I am
Speaker 1: pro bird rights where it turns out, you guys, birds
Speaker 1: are pretty cool and I do think they should be president,
Speaker 1: but you know that's just my opinion, not to get
Speaker 1: all political on the podcast. Definitely birds should be president anyways,
Speaker 1: would be a hundred times smarter than our guys. Get
Speaker 1: get out and vote because I love animals, and you
Speaker 1: can't love animals and not pay attention to politics, because hey,
Speaker 1: some politicians actually are really bad for the planet and
Speaker 1: do things that actively harm the environment, which is where
Speaker 1: we all live and where animals live. And in particular,
Speaker 1: the Trump administration has been exceedingly bad when it comes
Speaker 1: to obviously environmental protections but also specifically protections for birds,
Speaker 1: and just like aggressively taking away all of these protections
Speaker 1: for birds, making it easier for people to kill birds,
Speaker 1: for industries to kill birds. It's really horrible. So if
Speaker 1: you love birds, get out and vote. You know, just
Speaker 1: it's not good. It's not a good situation. If you
Speaker 1: have any questions or pictures of your pets you want
Speaker 1: to send, there's Creature Feature pot at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. If you're enjoying the show,
Speaker 1: you can leave a rating or review. I read all
Speaker 1: the reviews and it warms my little cold triveled bird heart.
Speaker 1: Thanks to the Space Classics for their super awesome song
Speaker 1: x Alumina. Creature Feature is a production of I Heart Radio.
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Speaker 1: next Wednesday. Un Happy Creature, We