Are crows the smartest birds in the world?
They lost out on looks,
but nature has given your average,
garbage-loving crow other advantages.
Behind that mean-looking face
in proportion to its weight.
A crow’s brain is 2.7% of its body weight.
But your brain is only 1.9% of your total weight.
Here’s 007. He's having his
first go at an eight-step puzzle.
After being captured, 007
spent three months learning each step.
But for his final test,
he'll have to figure out the specific order in
which to perform all these steps
to reach a tasty piece of meat.
Bingo! That’s a clever bird!
Stay tuned as we dive into the mind of a crow.
Caledonian crows like 007 show problem-solving skills
well beyond what survival might demand.
They fashion tools out of twigs and sticks to reach food.
And they can be precise when choosing
natural materials to make tools.
In 2014, scientists at the University of Auckland,
New Zealand tested New Caledonian crows'
understanding of water displacement.
They found that these crows could be as
clever as an average 5 to 7-year-old human.
And researchers at the University of Tübingen
in Germany discovered
that crows even understand the concept of zero.
The crows understood zero as a specific numerical value
that's less than one and not just as a simple something
versus nothing situation.
But we still don’t know how their mathematical ability
could be helpful to wild crows.
I mean, they either have food or they don’t.
But that’s precisely what makes
an animal uniquely intelligent.
Primates often use their intelligence to
entertain themselves with puzzles and games.
And it seems, so do crows.
Scientists are still unsure about whether this guy here
is having some certified fun but come on.
How could anyone not?
Problem-solving happens
in the pre-frontal cortex for primates.
Crows do not have this exact structure.
But they do have a higher concentration of neurons
in a similar area of their brain, that
could be the likely source of their intelligence.
But can you guess why crows evolved to be this smart?
The social intelligence theory offers the
most compelling explanation so far.
Primates are highly competitive.
And keeping tabs on the politics
of everyone's messy love lives is essential to surviving.
But for the monogamous crow, it's the teen years that offer
the biggest challenge.
Young crows hang out in highly aggressive
and competitive juvenile gangs. And like many
kinds of gangs, things can get, well, quite rough.
The more clever a crow is, the more likely
it is to make it to adulthood.
Crows make impressive use of their
hard-earned social intelligence.
As annoying as that caw might sound,
crows have a complex language,
complete with regional dialects.
An immigrant crow will try to fit in
by learning the local language and copying accents too.
When a crow dies, the whole flock gathers for what looks
like a funeral. These funerals are equal
parts mourning and crime scene investigation.
What killed this crow? And how can we avoid similar
deaths in the future?
These are important questions to the funeral party.
Even if there is ample food at the death site,
no crow will eat it.
So maybe we have misunderstood
this clever bird.
But if you feel tempted to chase away
the next crow you see, think again.
This clever avian will remember your face
for up to five years.
It will also be sure to warn other crows about you.
And as researchers from the University of Washington,
who used cavemen masks to trap and band crows
found out, the next time you approach a flock,
you could be mobbed and scolded.
As time passes, more crows will have
learned to respond negatively to you
And to be fair, it's not just the bad stuff that they remember.
A young girl in Seattle who has been feeding crows
in her backyard has won their little crow hearts.
They routinely leave her various
trinkets and “treasures” in the bird feeder as a thank you.
They even left her the “best” side
of a best friends necklace.
and I can’t continue on because my heart just
melted and I died.
Crows have extraordinary intelligence and incredible
social skills. And that’s what makes them Crazy Creatures.