Raven is the smartest bird. Why is the crow smart or two paths of evolution
Those who have observed the behavior of crows know that they are VERY smart birds.
However, there are also renegades who do not believe in this.
Their argument is always the same:
- It’s clear why monkeys and dolphins are smart, because they are very advanced evolutionarily. They are HIGHER mammals. And the crow has a beak, two wings and a sphincter, and that’s all. You will also say that a cockroach can have developed intelligence.
These people do not know that evolution can proceed both physically and mentally.
For example, we have an extremely primitive fish that eats worms.
And so she swam and swam and smelled a worm.
But there is an obstacle between the fish and the worm - for example, some kind of underwater plant.
The fish has TWO possible evolutionary solutions to the problem that has arisen.
First solution - PHYSICAL upgrade: the fish from generation to generation modifies its body to learn how to BREAK underwater obstacles. She grows a powerful tusk on her nose, enlarges her teeth, and grows claws. In general, it turns into a living bulldozer. Now she is not afraid of any obstacles - she will DESTROY them. 
But there is a second way to solve it - MENTAL upgrade: the fish DOES NOT CHANGE in appearance, but masters new, more complex and intelligent patterns of behavior. Those. she pumps up her brain and begins to figure out that the obstacle can simply be AROUND. 
What follows from this?
It follows that the mental development of an animal is by no means always proportional to its physical.
That is, those animals that physically adapted to the world around them may be very complex physically, but at the same time stupid as a tree.
And, on the contrary, some bugs, which for millions of years have adapted to life ONLY with the help of intellect, could well pass the Unified State Exam if they could talk. What can we say about crows?
By the way, women in our time are also divided into two evolutionary branches.
Some adapt to life physically: they go to fitness clubs, fill their lips with silicone, get injections in the FACE, enlarge their breasts, etc.
And others do not touch their body, but adapt to life mentally: they engage in self-development, receive three higher educations, go to all sorts of trainings, etc.
In theory, after five hundred years of such evolution, representatives of these two branches will be WILDLY different from each other - just like the two above-mentioned fish in the drawings.
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Most birds from kind of raven have amazing mental abilities.
Scientists who study the intelligence of crows claim that these birds are smarter than a four-year-old child and much smarter than many animals.
They often outperform many mammals and other birds in intelligence tests.
In the scientific world, interest in avian intelligence arose when biologists and anthropologists seriously thought about the origin of human intelligence, which could not have arisen out of nowhere, without serious evolutionary development.
Intelligence was primarily studied in our closest relatives, the primates, but scientists were surprised to find signs of advanced intelligence and cognitive abilities in corvid birds, which are not as evolutionarily close to humans as monkeys.
New Caledonian crows (Corvusmoneduloides) are “champions” in intelligence even among their corvid relatives.
For a long time, one of the main signs of high intelligence, which distinguishes humans from other animals, was considered to be manipulation of tools. But, as it turned out, birds can also use tools, as well as create and modify them. This ability has been observed not only in corvids, but also in herons and Galapagos woodpecker finches. However, New Caledonian crows became the favorites of animal psychologists in terms of intelligence.
Even in Aesop's fable about the crow and the jug, it was described how the clever bird threw stones into the jug in order to drink when the water level rose.
Biologists from the University of Cambridge conducted an experiment confirming the high level of intelligence of crows. The experiment involved five wild New Caledonian ravens, which had to get a piece of meat from a narrow vessel half filled with water, showing intelligence, since it was impossible to reach food with its beak.
After several attempts, all participants in the experiment found a successful solution to this problem - the crows threw pebbles into the vessel until the water level rose enough to grab the treat with their beaks.
Moreover, the cunning crows refused to pick up light porous stones, specially left nearby by scientists, and chose heavy stones, which quickly led them to prey.
At the next stage, the scientists complicated the intelligence tasks: they changed the vessels, added vessels with sand, or filled them with nothing. Smart birds did not always stupidly rush to throw the largest stone into the water, but in each specific situation they selected the most successful of the alternative options to achieve their goal. The crows consciously solved new puzzles and did not associate the presence of food with the presence of water in the vessel and large stones next to it.
Thus, scientists have found that crows are able to distinguish between substances and select the most suitable tools in shape and weight in order to extract food in a particular situation.
And in the next experiment, the New Caledonian raven had to solve an 8-stage mentality task in order not only to manage to remove a short stick hanging on a rope, but then with its help to get 3 pebbles from the cages (and exactly 3, less weight was not enough), then reset everything Place 3 pebbles in a device with a long enough branch, and with its help you can finally reach the far-hidden bait! This was a world record for intelligence. It seems to me that crows are smarter than many of us :)
There are many sightings of New Caledonian crows in nature when they use their beaks to tear crooked branches from bushes, peel off excess bark from them, leave a small twig at the end, and deftly wield the resulting hook, removing insects from cracks and other hard-to-reach places.
New Caledonian crows are not limited to just sticks and twigs. Experiments by zoologists from the University of Auckland (New Zealand) have shown that these birds can even use such a mysterious object as a mirror for their own purposes.
Using a mirror, the crows determined where the piece of meat was located (they did not see the food itself, only its reflection). Looking at the reflection, the birds understood where to put their beaks in order to get food, and the experiments were carried out with wild birds that had not yet had time to live next to a person and observe him.
It is known that wild animals are very rarely able to understand that the image in the mirror is their own reflection. The ability to solve the “mirror test” is possessed by a small intellectual elite of the animal world, which includes gray parrots, some primates, dolphins and Indian elephants. Well, and human cubs older than 18 months :) Now crows have also been added to them.
New Caledonian crows are not the only object of study for biologists. Japanese zoologists from Utsunomiya University have proven that big-beaked crows can match numbers and abstract symbols to quantities of food. By the numbers and geometric shapes on containers with food, the birds recognized where there was more and where there was less.
And people’s everyday observations of the familiar hooded crows and other corvids provide material testifying to their developed mental abilities:
The evidence for the intelligence of corvids is numerous and impossible to list in one article.
Below, under the spoiler, I present an excerpt from an interesting article about the structure of the brain of corvids, describing research conducted at the Department of Biology of the Chuvash State Pedagogical University named after. I. Ya. Yakovleva.
Excerpt from an article about the structural features of the brain of crows
We managed to find out that
It must be said that until recently, the psyche of birds was traditionally underestimated, and not only because of the small size of their brain, but also because of the specifics of its structure. The bird brain lacks a six-layer neocortex (which mammals have), and its evolution was due to the transformation of the nuclei of the striatum, or striatum.
The striatum is older than the cortex, and its functions are simpler than that of it, therefore the central nervous system of birds was perceived as a primitive structure, not intended to carry out the higher cognitive functions that the neocortex of mammals performs.
Over time, however, the point of view on the bird's brain began to change - it turned out to be more complex than thought.
It was found that, despite the differences in the spatial organization of the neural networks of the striatum of birds and the neocortex of mammals, their formation and development in evolution are determined by the same morphological patterns.
Do corvids have any features that distinguish their brains from other birds? To do this, the crow needs to be compared with someone - for example, with a dove. Pigeons really are not very smart, and numerous works by Professor Zoya Aleksandrovna Zorina and her colleagues from the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University made it possible to find out in detail exactly how pigeons are dumber than crows. Gray crows are able to estimate the size of sets and store such mathematical information not only in specific images, but also in a generalized, abstract form, which birds can associate, for example, with Arabic numerals; they can see analogies in the shape of objects without paying attention to the color of those objects. That is, birds seem to represent a separate feature “in the mind,” without reference to a specific object. Pigeons learn this procedure much more slowly. In addition, the learning mindset is practically not formed in pigeons, while in corvids it appears quite quickly and on the basis of an optimal strategy. Obviously, the difference in cognitive abilities is explained by differences in the brain structure of the two species of birds.
We managed to find out that a crow has twice as many neurons in its brain as a pigeon, and their specific density is twice as high. At the same time, neurons and glia in the brain of a crow are smaller, and neuroglial complexes are larger than those of a pigeon.
In crows, the structural components of the brain are located closer to each other, which speeds up and optimizes the functioning of nerve circuits.
So, crows owe their exceptional intelligence to the peculiarities of their neural architecture. But still, birds, including corvids, are noticeably inferior to mammals in terms of the total number of neurons. If a crow’s brain has 660 million neurons, then in animals their number is measured in tens of billions. What allows corvids to solve problems on a par with some primates? The fact is that in mammals in the evolutionary series the density of cellular elements decreases, and in birds it increases, including due to the combination of single neurons and glia into the above-mentioned neuroglial complexes. Apparently, in connection with the acquisition of the ability of birds to fly, if necessary, on the one hand, maximum lightening of the total mass, and on the other, acceleration of movements in their brains, a radical optimization of information processing mechanisms took place. This required a different structural-cellular solution: instead of the columnar structure characteristic of mammals, birds developed spherical cell complexes. These complexes have become the most important structural and functional units of the bird brain, their efficiency being equal to the neural columns in the animal brain.
“Needless to say, the crow is a smart bird, many people know this. Scientists who study the intelligence of crows claim that these birds are smarter than a four-year-old child and much smarter than many animals.
Ornithologists consider the crow to be a unique object for observation and an animal whose intelligence is comparable to that of humans.
Most birds of the crow family have remarkable mental abilities. They often outperform many mammals and other birds in intelligence tests. New Caledonian crows (Corvusmoneduloides) are “champions” in intelligence even among their relatives. On our Earth, only humans, some higher primates and these amazing crows know how to make and use tools.
Biologists from the University of Cambridge conducted an experiment confirming the high level of intelligence of crows.
The experiment involved five wild New Caledonian ravens, who had to get a piece of meat from a vessel half filled with water, showing intelligence and ingenuity, because the food was not taken out in the usual and simple way, the beak did not reach the food.
After making several attempts, all the scientists' wards were able to independently find the most rational solution to this problem - they took the “stones” in their beaks, lifted them to the neck of the cylinder and threw them into the water. Step by step, the water level rose and after a while the piece of food rose to a level where the crow could catch it with its beak.
The crows quickly learned the lesson and easily got food. Scientists scattered nearby many different stones made of light materials that did not sink, but they were unable to deceive the wise crows. The birds chose heavy, large stones to quickly fill the vessel and eat food floating on the surface. Probably, the crow estimates the weight of the stone, taking it in its beak, and realizes that light stones do not bring prey closer to it.
Scientists changed the vessels, added vessels with sand, or filled them with nothing. What is surprising is that the birds did not always look for the largest stone or vessel filled with water - they often checked alternative options.
Thus, scientists have found that crows are able to evaluate the mass and shape of their “tools” and distinguish between different types of matter - sand, water and air.
The vast majority of animals on Earth look for food according to a conditioned reflex, but not crows and, especially, New Zealand crows, the smartest of them. The crows consciously solved new riddles and did not associate signs of the presence of food with the presence of water in the vessel and large stones next to it.
Thus, crows living in New Caledonia not only know how to use tools, but also consciously evaluate their suitability and effectiveness in each specific case, which puts these birds on the same level as humans and higher primates. New Zealand and British scientists wrote about this in an article published in the journal PLoSONE.
Why is the crow so smart?
It is believed that the crow is very smart by nature, but there is another advantage: crows are flocking birds. Living in a flock, where each bird already has a mind, crows also learn and adopt experience from their flock mates. Thus, a collective experience arises, which is mastered by each bird in the flock. That's why crows are so smart.
Crows are social birds. They are no strangers to mutual assistance. If the chicks in the nest are in danger, it doesn’t matter from whom, be it a predator or a person, the whole flock will selflessly come to the defense, the offender will not find it enough. Of course, there are minor “everyday” squabbles within the pack, but we, humans, are often guilty of this.
Observations of these unique birds have shown that they are capable of planning their actions. During one experiment conducted at the University of Oxford in the UK, the bird came up with the idea of bending a wire with its beak to make a hook and get food from a narrow transparent flask. The crow managed to get the basket with the treat, although no one taught it such tricks.
Crows skillfully hide their prey, like spies, looking around, burying their “stash.” Birds also realize that they should hide their prey if other birds have seen where the food is hidden. But it should be noted that the crows hid their supplies only after the “witnesses” flew away.
Crows are extremely cunning; they rarely fall into traps and, even if caught, are able to get out of them. Anyone who has ever dealt with them will tell you about these qualities of crows. Fishermen told how crows in winter, when holes were cut in the ice and a fishing line with live bait was lowered there, pulled it out in the absence of fishermen and pecked it. According to eyewitnesses, not a single crow has ever been caught on a hook.
In general, crows, which have lived next to humans for centuries, are in many ways similar to people. Thus, crows correctly determine the meaning of traffic lights - when the light is red, they calmly pick up the corpses of animals hit by cars on the road, and when the light is green, they fly away. They can clearly distinguish what is in a person’s hands, a stick or a gun; distinguish between a child and an adult, a man and a woman
Not long ago, Tokyo residents observed the amazing behavior of these birds. City crows gathered in noisy crowds at highway intersections. At a red light, without fear of cars, they quickly flew onto the roadway and laid walnuts on the asphalt. As the cars passed and the light turned red again, the cunning crows harvested the cracked nuts.
Having found a dry bread crust, the crow will never choke on the dry bread, but will definitely find a puddle, soak the bread, and only after that will it eat it or take it to the chicks. She can open a matchbox with her paw and unscrew a candy wrapper without damaging it.
Crows are monogamous birds - having found a mate, they live with her until the end. And crows can live the longest of all birds - 50-75 years. These amazing birds are wonderful and caring parents. They care for the chicks, protect and even raise them.
Crows communicate with each other a lot and with pleasure; the crow language is extremely developed and has a rich “vocabulary”. Crows use different sounds to address the young, swear, threaten, emit alarm signals, and have a loving conversation. Sometimes several birds make one sound, in unison, for greater volume.
Crows are also kept as pets. Having tamed such a bird, a person gets a lot of pleasure from communicating with it. Sometimes you can “talk” with a crow, because these amazing birds can imitate the human voice. A tamed crow becomes a faithful and reliable friend to a person for life. A domestic crow will protect the home and owner from the villain no worse than a guard dog. Unfortunately, it is impossible to release a tamed crow into the wild; it will no longer be able to adapt and will die.
And not without a sense of humor
"THE CROW SIDTED THE USA SYMBOL AND RIDED LIKE A TAXI"
"Crow rides on windshield wipers"
"At Moscow State University, for example, in one study, crows were offered straight sticks with hooks at the end to get pieces of meat. Without hesitation, the subjects chose the second option. The next time they were given only straight wire rods, the ends of which were immediately turned into hooks by the beaks of the birds. And in the final round a sensation happened. During the experiment, the crows had to press a target button with their beaks so that food would fall into the feeder. When the target was blocked with a screen with a small hole, the birds were taught to insert a match into it, allowing them to reach the button. Imagine the surprise of the scientists when one of the tested “persons” instead began to slip a match to the side, using it as a lever to achieve the desired result. This method turned out to be easier, because... did not require aiming at the notorious hole.
In addition, crows have excellent memory and high learning ability. According to experts, they have the ability for rational activity, exhibit associative and logical thinking, and have basic mathematical knowledge (count to five, distinguish shape, symmetry, size ratio, three-dimensional bodies and flat figures). And they know how to be friends. They live in flocks, get food together and share it with each other, defend themselves against enemies together, are capable of mutual assistance, sometimes even build nests together, and do not abandon their relatives in trouble. In difficult situations they can turn to a person for help. Here is one such story. One evening there was a knock on the balcony door of an apartment on the seventh floor. The visitor turned out to be a crow with a bone stuck in its throat. The bird approached the owner of the house and raised its head up, demonstrating the problem, and when he saved it from the misfortune, it turned and went home, asking with a nod and a single “karr” to open the balcony, through which it got to good people. Note: not only did she learn the route, but she also knew how to get them in and who to turn to - the strongest in the family. Where can such knowledge come from if not by studying Homo sapiens?
Everyone has heard this saying: “wise as a raven.” What makes this gloomy bird the smartest? Most likely, the reason for this is the famous poem by Edgar Poe, where the raven was the main character. But on the other hand, maybe because they know where to find the best, can solve puzzles, have specific goals, lie for their own benefit and contact similar species like them?
"Zephyr" for a smart bird
Almost forty years ago, the legendary “marshmallow experiment” took place in Great Britain. Its essence is this: each of the squad of 4-year-old children, of whom there were six hundred, received a marshmallow and had to eat it immediately, or leave it in his hands for a while and earn two marshmallows. As a result, some of the children heard about the second condition of the task when they were already chewing marshmallows with pleasure. As it turned out later, the kids who showed perseverance and restraint showed excellent results during their school years.
How are crows related in this case? Until this point, it was common knowledge that crows can hide food supplies for themselves, but this does not indicate the presence of intelligence. For example, squirrels dig nuts into the ground, but after that they don’t remember where they made their hiding places in 75% of cases, and because of this, a large number of new trees appear.
But the black wise birds are not like that. During the experiment, it turned out that a raven can refuse a tasty treat if it knows that in the future it will receive even more for it. When the experimental birds were offered food right away or a tool with which they could open a box with a “prize,” they chose the tool, even if the box was not yet there. The crows remembered that the box always appears 15 minutes after the tool, and decided to be patient in order to win.
Thieves and deceivers
But that's not all. During another experiment, a raven was asked to drink water from a narrow vessel into which its head could not fit. Then the bird showed excellent knowledge of Archimedes' law: it began to throw heavy objects into the vessel, which raised the water level, until finally the raven was able to drink.
Despite their intelligence, crows are not very burdened with moral dilemmas and, on occasion, are ready to steal food from a fellow crow. To do this, they monitor where other birds hide food, and then rob the caches. But the legitimate owners of food are also often cunning and only pretend to hide supplies, misleading the thieves.
Of course, crows do not always behave like complete egoists. They can tell other crows where to find a source of tasty food and cooperate to ward off rivals. Moreover, the birds call not only “their own”, sometimes inviting wolves to the wounded animals. Predators kill them and take part of the meat, and the rest goes to the “gunners”.
Personally, you can’t take me out into the sun in the summer heat unless absolutely necessary. But my household cannot live without dacha exotics. So when they return home, I get to play the role of listener - how much I missed by not seeing this or that. My engineer husband, a far from exalted man and, in general, a man of few words, simply transforms before our eyes when he begins to talk, for example, about... a crow.
– You should have seen how she breaks walnuts! It will take it in its beak, fly to the road, and drop it onto the asphalt from a great height. If the nut remains intact, she picks it up, flies higher and again throws it on the asphalt. And so on until the nut cracks.
- Come on! The nut is simply too big for the crow's beak, so she drops it!
– No, I’ve seen similar scenes more than once. And every time the impression is that the crow fully understands what it wants. Or, he can also place a nut under the wheels of an approaching car. And he’s not afraid to walk on the road! And then he picks up pieces of the nucleolus.
– Well, this is actually on the verge of fantasy! So, she seems to be calculating what will happen if a heavy car drives over the nut?
- That's it! And if she manages to snatch a dry crust of bread, she will not choke - she will find a tin of rainwater and begin to dip it. It will soak a piece, and then eat it or take it to the nest to the chicks. By the way, about the nest. Have you ever seen a crow's nest up close? No? And since childhood, I never cease to be amazed at how she builds such a complex engineering structure. There the frame is made of pieces of wire, which are intertwined in the most intricate way, and then all this is strengthened with branches, paper, pieces of fabric and who knows what else. In any case, as boys we learned that breaking a crow’s nest is not so easy!
- Well, it's just an ancient instinct. What does the mind have to do with it?
- And despite the fact that she can pull a fishing line with fish to the shore instead of you, if you are careless. And not when there is nothing on the hook, but precisely at the moment when the float twitches. This means he realizes that the fish has already been caught and he must hurry!
Similar dialogues took place with us more than once. But I didn’t attach much importance to them: my family, who are in love with nature, are not averse to slightly embellishing reality. But in August of this year I came across a description of scientific experiments that scientists are conducting - specifically with a crow. And you wouldn’t suspect them of telling stories. And just imagine, the researchers also came to the conclusion that the crow is somehow too smart. That is, she not only uses a certain object as a tool, but can make it herself, with her own... I almost said - with her hands. With your own paws and beak!
The crow that so captured the imagination of scientists was named Betty. They also have another similar individual living there, in Oxford, but male, named Abel. Abel is already getting older, his “smartness” has clearly become dull. But a young bird named Betty, according to researchers, is capable of thinking in terms of cause and effect relationships. By the way, when similar experiments were carried out with primates, our closest relatives, they really disappointed scientists - they turned out to be clearly stupid. But the crow...
Alex Kaselnik, professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Oxford, states literally the following:
– The crow is not only smarter than we think. In terms of tools, she shows a higher understanding than chimpanzees .
A team of Oxford scientists stumbled upon this sensational discovery almost by accident. While studying the behavior of two crows, Corvus moneduloides, caught in New Caledonia, a French island group in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the researchers decided to test whether the crow could retrieve food from a vertical container using a piece of wire or a hook. Imagine the surprise of the professor when, in experiment number five, male Abel stole a hook and flew away with it to another part of the poultry house, and female Betty quickly built herself a hook herself, bending an even piece of wire, and finally got the food! Amazed scientists at first thought it was a pure coincidence. They began to repeat the experiment with pieces of straight wire over and over again. And nine times out of ten, Betty made the hook and got her food!
“Although many animals use something like tools, we are not yet aware of other cases in which, in order to solve a new problem, they meaningfully subjected an object to purposeful modification,” Professor Kaselnik summarizes in purely scientific language.
As for the aforementioned crows from New Caledonia, they have already been “caught” making at least two tools. Gavin Hunt, a professor at the University of Auckland from New Zealand, has also studied these smart birds, but he doesn't think Betty's behavior is all that unique. There are other birds that are far from chicken-brained. For example, a woodpecker from the Galapagos Islands uses a cactus thorn to pick out insects. Pigeons are known to be able to recognize a specific person, distinguish letters of the alphabet from each other, and even learn the differences between paintings. And let's not even talk about parrots. For example, Alex, an African gray parrot, became a big celebrity in the 1980s: he had a vocabulary of hundreds of English words and could ask questions and make requests. Another Gray named Casco, a resident of Isfahan (Iran), is a real polyglot and even a devout Muslim: he knows about 180 words in Persian and Arabic, calls Shiite imams by name, and clearly pronounces several dozen sayings from the Koran. But you won’t surprise us with parrots - it’s clear that they are capable of imitation. But the crows...
Why did they suddenly decide to investigate these scavengers? And why, one might ask, was this particular species caught for experiments? Because in natural conditions, in the lap of nature, it was noticed how, when obtaining food, crows choose a flyer of exactly the length and shape that is required in this particular case, making a kind of hook out of it. That is, it seems that the bird analyzes possible options in its mind and calculates the consequences. This intrigued ornithologists: could she be able to remake an instrument of non-natural origin? Well, now this is confirmed too. And the results of the study by Oxford scientists were published on August 9, 2002 in the scientific journal Science.
By the way, in the past, Gavin Hunt from Auckland conducted research during which it was discovered that the crow, like most people, is not left-handed, but right-handed. We noticed this while observing the very sophisticated manipulations that she performs, folding leaves into an object of the desired shape.
The bird tears off pieces of leaves or twigs and turns them into a tool to remove insects from a tree trunk, using the right side of its beak more often than the left. Previously, a similar tendency to use predominantly the right side of the body was observed only in humans and some primates. When the same tendency was noticed in a crow, the question arose: maybe it is also one of the fairly developed creatures? Moreover, Gavin Hunt considers crow actions to be a manifestation of a high level of “craft”. "It's quite a bit of a process of picking off leaves and biting them down to make tools of the right shape," Hunt told the BBC.
Hunt and his colleagues described in the journal Nature how they collected these very “tools” of Corves moneduloides and analyzed them. And we came to the conclusion that such a complex of sequential actions requires considerable mental effort.
Why are researchers so intrigued by the “right-beaked” features of crows? Because before this, it was believed that in humans this was associated with the ability for meaningful speech, and that the part of the brain that controls the right side of the body is responsible for speech. When it comes to right-billed crows, there is a lot to think about. Either we are mistaken about our speech, or the crow can also speak, but carefully hides it. However, it is well known that some raven can speak no worse than a parrot; they may have a decent “vocabulary.” In addition, he has a relatively melodic voice, unlike the crow, which only croaks. In any case, the raven and the crow (and these, imagine, are different birds, and each has its own females and males) probably have an ancient history. And not so long ago, scientists came to the conclusion that the ancestor of crows was a winged dinosaur.
In 1998, American archaeologists who were excavating on the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean unearthed the remains of a strange creature that resembled a bird.
Discovered in northern Madagascar, this creature lived on Earth approximately 65 or 70 million years ago (named Rahona Ostromi) and was about the size of a crow, but its skeleton was clearly different from that of a modern bird.
Like a bird, the rachona was covered in feathers, and its opposable thumb allowed it to cling to branches and perch on trees. However, it was a predatory and fearless creature that could hack and slash its prey with its claws, much like the flying killers immortalized in the movie Jurassic Park. So, it seems that crows have very ancient survival experience and no less ancient intellectual baggage.
And the funniest thing about crows is, you know what? That foreign scientists came to such conclusions only now, but our ornithologists knew all this a long time ago. That is, that the crow has intelligence. More than two years ago, an article in the newspaper “World of News” was called “Intellectual Crow”. And it says that the famous Russian scientist Leonid Viktorovich Krushinsky compiled something like a rating of the mental abilities of fauna representatives. From this rating it is clear that among the birds the most intelligent are crows and jackdaws (jackdaws, by the way, belong to the same family of corvids as ravens and crows), moreover, in terms of mental development, crows are higher than cats, dogs and even wolves. “Seven-year-old children could cope with some of the tasks that wolves solved,” scientists say. “It’s easy to assume that a crow’s intelligence corresponds to the intelligence of an eight or nine year old child.”
That's it! This was proven in an experiment conducted at the Moscow State University biological station.
Seven crows were put in different cages, from which they could see each other, and next to the cages, at a distance inaccessible to their beaks, they placed a piece of crow delicacy. Literally a few minutes later, one of the crows tore up the newspaper bedding, rolled a piece of paper into a thick tube and, taking it in its beak, rolled the treat to the cage using this very tube. The rest of the crows immediately followed suit. That is, the crow seems to calculate its actions and only then does something. Maybe it’s thanks to her remarkable bird mind that she never collides with cars or trains, unlike other birds. And the proportion between body weight and brain weight in a crow is the same as in a person. Or, let's say, like a dolphin.
And recently, one of the newspapers published an interesting article, “The Raven is still that little thing,” and such an experiment was described there. If a crow is offered food to choose from from two feeders (and the bird knows from experience that the second one will be removed immediately), then it will unmistakably choose the one with at least one more worms - 11 or 12. A person is not able to immediately determine such an insignificant difference , and the crow never makes a mistake. How does she manage to calculate? Mystery. And even in more complex experiments she invariably comes out on top.
If you cover the feeders with cards with numbers (for example, “1+2” and “2+2”), then she will definitely choose the one with the largest numbers. Scientists are forced to admit that ravens “distinguish the sign of number”, “are capable of generalization and abstraction”... And what is this if not a sign of intelligence? Such actions cannot be attributed to instincts or reflexes.
In general, crows, which have lived next to humans for centuries, are in many ways similar to people. City birds love sausage, lard, cheese, and chicken eggs. From time to time they organize something like general gatherings, which sometimes attract several tens of thousands of individuals. Let's say in the Canadian city of Woodstock the population is 35 thousand, and the crows gather about 70-75 thousand.
People are trying to understand what all these noisy gatherings are for? Who knows? Maybe the crows exchange news, or maybe they help the young ones choose a suitable mate. Their families, by the way, are strong and monogamous, and their young are raised until they reach adulthood, until the grown chicks create their own family. Crows keenly sense danger: they won’t let a person with a gun get close, but with a stick of the same size - please. They love to frolic, playing with a tennis ball or sliding down the church dome like an ice slide. In general, as they say, nothing human is alien to them.
What about the fact that crows sometimes attack hares, dogs and even people? Where is their vaunted intellect?
And here, excuse me, the point is in the natural specialization of these birds - orderlies of the forest and the city. They catch sick and weakened animals and attack only those who emanate vibes of weakness and fear. Crows are extremely sensitive to the adrenaline released in such cases. Therefore, it is believed that in the city the crow occupies the top of the ecological pyramid. Its population is growing as more carrion and other refuse appear in our cities. Here the crow is simply irreplaceable. So it’s in vain that they set traps here and there, poison and shoot crows. However, you don’t have to worry too much: they are smart enough and will still survive! But whether those who are trying to destroy them will survive, there’s no way to say it!
