Ravens can plan for future as well as 4-year-old children can
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Its nest had fallen from a tree in a storm - we found it a day or so later in a not great state. But within a day of feeding it was hand tame and happily came to live in the house. By the end of the summer though it learnt the skills it needed and flew off.
While it lived with us it quickly learnt the places we were happy for it to be in the house, where its 'bed' was and when we would feed it. It continually picked up small toys to play with and would delight in dropping things off the table for us to fetch and return for it.
In some ways I was so sad when it left, and as a child regretted not clipping its wings - but I'm pleased we didn't and was hopeful it went off to lead a normal magpie life ;)
The child was chasing it, and the jackdaw used hedges and toys to hide behind, and whenever the tiny human came close, the jackdaw would run to the next thing and hide.
When the child got bored, the jackdaw would run back to the child to get it to chase again.
It was clear that they were both enjoying the game, and the parents didn't even realise that this had happened because they were meters away fumbling with a grill.
When I was a child we also nurtured a jackdaw back to health, his name was Klaus and he learned to talk, he understood the concept of "Hello" and would use it correctly when you entered the house, and if he wanted you to leave him alone or we got stuck in a "Hello" greeting-loop, he would say "Go away".
As a kid I once rescued a humming bird that got tangled in a spiders web. I walked around with it for a few minutes and carefully cleaned the web off. Then suddenly after realizing it was ok. The bird was all too happy to fly off.
It must have been fun to have a bird stick around like that.
But for ages it couldn't feed itself and relied on me dropping cat food into its open beak with tweezers - I'm pretty sure it did this longer than it would in the wild. Then one day when it was playing in the garden it learnt how to catch worms and insects, and then the next day it started drinking from puddles and then the next day it just flew away.
It might have returned, but to be honest even then it would have been hard to recognise amongst other magpies - but it never tried to come in the house again, even though we left the doors open.
For a few years after (and even now to be honest) I sometimes shout 'Marilyn' when I see magpies - hoping it will recognise me ;) (we chose 'Marilyn' as I'd recently read it was historically a mans name, so I thought it was good to choose something gender neutral)
Thanks for sparking that memory, I hadn't thought of that in ages.
Researchers trained ravens to exchange some tokens for food. Presented with a choice of 15 different objects, majority of the birds picked the food tokens and stashed them for up to 17 hours until an opportunity for exchange came again.
The author believes this passes as the pinnacle of a 4 year old's planning abilities.
Overall, is it really useful to compare Ravens and human children for their long term planning ability? Human children are still under the care of their parents. There's no real pressure on them to store food tokens...
A raven's memories are for the future
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/126
When searching, I also found this, which I missed the first time around, and it might be interesting to some:
Subadult ravens generally don't transfer valuable tokens to conspecifics when there is nothing to gain for themselves
That article is a non-peer reviewed perspective on some recent research. To provide background they make a throw away comment about some work done in 2007 [1] and say it's kind of similar to what you see in 4 year old children (in another study).
The original researchers don't seem to have made that statement, or attempted to support it. So... par for the course for New Scientist I guess...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17314979?access_num=1731...
The Great Filter on the other hand, relies on assuming the steps from evolved intelligence (now) to solar system colonization/FTL travel are not only possible, but just a matter of a few millennia or so. Which is a huge assumption.
That being said, most atheists come from religious regions or families. They consider those holidays their heritage and celebrate them. Christmas is seen equally to, let's say, Halloween. Nobody cares about Samhain but they care about candies. Nobody cares about the birthday of Jesus but they care about receiving their family and giving them gifts.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/ravens-discover-the-brainpowe...
It's not going to go well under our new Raven Overlords.
My only hope is to taste like chicken fingers and therefore die quickly.
What if ravens just act accordingly to environmental cues instead?