Crows caught on camera making tools in the wild | Hacker News Reader

Crows caught on camera making tools in the wild

csmonitor.com

54 pointsFuturebot29 comments

I've seen crows in Berlin on multiple occasions dropping chestnuts on the road near traffic lights, wait until they are cracked open by cars driving over them, then picking up the marrow when the traffic light goes red. Probably not as advanced as tool usage but still impressive to watch.

Here's a video (from Japan) about this phenomenon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0

I wonder whether it was discovered independently, or if it has been communicated somehow. Or maybe they've "always" done this, except with horses before cars.

Amazing. In Berlin, the crows are mostly grey 'hooded crows' (Nebelkraehe in German), they seem to have displaced the pigeons that were common 5 to 10 years ago.

When there are no cars, the strategy is to simply drop them from high onto a hard surface (such as a road). They always fly off with their nuts when I try to help though..

Lots of crows and walnut trees in my 'hood. When I see a crow drop a nut into the street when I'm out and about, I walk over and crush it. I'm hoping someday they'll recognize me and start dropping near me when I'm walking :-)

It isn't new. It's probably older than man. Birds drop seashells onto rocks to break them open, something you don't need roads for. Car's parked at my local dog beach are constantly under attack from mussel-wielding crows.

But placing the shells on the road for the cars to squash. That's new.

Interesting. But then again, I've seen spiders making tools to catch other insects :)

Fantastic point! Never thought about it that way! We explain it away by saying it's "instinctive" behavior, which only kicks the can down the road.

>other insects

cough

A little more on the research - http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_488900_en.ht... including why it's difficult to do this in the wild. And some earlier research http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8631486.stm with video.

Other articles about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10788174 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10781284.

So to what stage of human development is this comparable? How long until crows are building computers?

Nice!

What makes human development much faster/different (IMO) is that we can store and pass on information to the next generations.

And as soon as the crows understand the way to do it, their development will accelerate drastically too.

Try pissing off a crow sometime. If you irritate it enough, it will tell its friends how to recognize you.

You'll know when this happens.

The radio announced today that if one is especially nice to crows, certain ones will bring you gifts such as shiny bits of glass and trinkets

Yes, that with "hands."

Pre cro-magnon. Give them 50 to 100 thousand years

crow-magnon?

You could set up monastery* where you wrap the science with sufficient doctrine to attract great devotees. Their real mission?, selectively breed intelligent crows. Then vary the methods and open 10 more monasteries. That would speed things up or fail in interesting ways.

* A conventional research lab won't do.

Not grad students who would only give 5 years to the cause.

Integrate other tool-using animals like dolphins and chimps, and see if interesting nontrivial interactions arise.

While a fun idea, I think we are already breading intelligent crows. Human trash provides high energy food, good for developing and supporting large brains. And the urban landscape is a complex environment with many dangers, but high reward for the curious and smart bird.

Actually, urban environments are probably a lot safer for birds than the wilderness. Unlike predator species, humans in cities don't actively hunt birds. In fact many people feed them. Buildings also provide really good shelter.

Give them actual hands like us and u have no doubt they'd be able to do even more impressive things.

Tool-using and tool-building are arbitrary distinctions. Once upon a time scientists thought there was some magic deciding line between man and beast, some key element found in us and no other animal. We now know that to be silly superstition.

Intelligence is a multi-spectrum gradient. Our brains are better at calculus, but a crow's brain can adjust for crosswind on landing better than any topgun veteran. To say one animal is smarter or more able than another speaks only of the adopted standard and says nothing of innate intelligence.

Am I the only one that found this headline confusing?

Surely this is unsurprising? Nests are tools, sort of.

My understanding is that tools are things used as a way to achieve an objective. Nests would BE the objective, aka shelter. Thus, an ant hill would not be considered a tool.

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