'Intelligent' crows to pick up litter at French theme park
expatica.com
expatica.com
Side note: All the crows in Vancouver roost on a single street. Every day around sundown there are 10s of thousands of crows flying east and creating a chaotic scene at times. I’ve seen hundreds of crows ripping up a lawn looking for worms once and it felt like a scene from a movie. Here is a video of all the crows causing ruckus: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_QuEjaG4Ghs
Also we have one crow here in Vancouver who was raised by a human so he is essentially part of the population. He takes the sktrain, walks into McDonald’s and even stole a knife from a crime scene once. It’s an absolute hoot. He even has his own Instagram page: https://instagram.com/canuckthecrow
Yep, this guy did it and it is quite fascinating; TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_o... Website: http://www.josh.is/crow-machine/
And also, this dutch startup is aiming at training crows to pick up cigarettes: https://www.crowdedcities.com/
Probably not. It probably seems like I'm shilling this researcher's blog in this thread at this point but this commentary [1] gives a short explanation of why.
One of my hobbies is actually bird watching, particularly with crows. I love the animals, they're very fascinating creatures. I've had the opportunity to interact with many of them because I set out peanuts for them near my neighborhood. They've very gradually become acclimated to this routine, and they reliably arrive to pick up food if I make a particular noise and they're in the area.
But I'm very skeptical that I could "train" them to start exchanging items for food. In captivity a crow's intelligence can be especially fostered and trained because there's no other source of food to distract it. If you want it to proceed through a puzzle [2] to get food it has to do so. But wild crows are very, very cautious and (like most animals) very economically rational in their feeding habits. To date none of the wild crows who give people items have been trained to do so, it's been a happy accident (it's never happened to me, unfortunately). If you start imposing an exchange system on the food dispensary, you might find that the crows simply go elsewhere for easier meals.
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1. I read somewhere about training crows to pickup cigarette butts in exchange food. I’ve always wondered if it would be possible to train a crow to pick up loose coins for food.
Surely that would depend on the exchange rate?
What seems not to have been mentioned so far is the difference between the economic rationality of an individual versus what happens when there's a large population of those individuals.
AFAICT, the goal of these projects isn't to train individuals but to train the population, in aggregate, perform the task.
It's not like crows are not willing to work for food. They have been documented breaking open stubborn mollusks by repeatedly flying them high above a road and dropping them until they crack, or throwing them under oncoming traffic to be smashed open.
The thing is that there are ample other food sources so whatever you provide needs to be truly exceptional insofar as rewards go. And the crows might not know it's a great reward until they solve the puzzle to get it.
I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just pessimistic.
So... Can't this plan backfire too?
Interested to see how this will work, for how long, and whether it's just PR.
Incidentally if you enjoy reading about crows take a look at the author's other posts on that blog. She's a scientist who writes about them (and her work) very frequently.
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1. https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/03/12/a-scientists-thoughts...
They already have many birds, and a falconry show so they certainly have the skills to train birds to do what they want.
https://www.puydufou.com/en/lallee-des-volieres
The park is usually pretty clean, not that many people litter anyway so as suspect it's more for the novelty and as a fun project for the falconry staff than to save on cleaning.
The owners of the park are also working with ultraorthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev to create similar parks in Russia and Crimea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Malofeev).
>He has teamed with a French developer to build two “Tsargrad” theme parks in Crimea that will present a family-friendly recounting of Russian history. He’s also developing Tsargrad TV, a cable network—for now it’s just a YouTube channel—that will provide a conservative Orthodox perspective on the news. “We want to build up [a network based on] Orthodox principles the way Fox News was built,” he says. “We want to show the news in the way that Orthodox people, who are 70 to 80 percent of the population, see it.” (Jack Hanick, a former Fox News employee, will be a producer for the network.) I ask if Russia’s existing TV networks aren’t conservative enough. “Aren’t Orthodox enough,” he counters.
>But his goals go beyond making Russia a more religious society. A self-described monarchist, he favors a full return of the Russian Empire, including the restoration of the czar. “Monarchies have been alive in history for thousands of years,” he says. “Republics, just for several centuries, yet we assume that monarchies belong to the past and republics to the future.” He points out that seven of the 10 wealthiest countries in the world are monarchies.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
Puy du Fou is using some of its revenues to finance religious/royalist French organizations and discreetly supports anti-abortion campaigns (https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2015/07/08/2140471-puy-fou-...).
Many of the shows glorify Christianism (like the Viking show where the Viking convert to Christianism at the end when they see a Saint rising from a river) or the Roman era arena show where the good guys are Christians persecuted in the arena, shouting to the Romans that their gods are fake (and winning at the end).
Other shows glorify the Vendee region (where the park is), and present King loyalists who fought against the Revolution as heroes (Charette).
Still, the park is beautiful and the shows are very good. I went with my kids and they enjoyed the sword fights and stunts, and didn't understand anything of their bullshit.
They are known to recognize faces of people and have stunning memory, remembering hundreds of places where they stash their food reserves etc. I think they are awesome.
Güntürkün: Cognition without cortex. https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S136...
Press release: http://news.rub.de/english/press-releases/2016-03-03-complex...
His talks are pretty good, there may be higher quality recordings than this one though: https://youtu.be/nHTTVFDjQ1Q
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30231743-are-we-smart-en...
That's just human (or, more generally, mammalian) exceptionalism/bias.
As a sibling comment helpfully linked, there's now research showing that avian brains create/house intelligence in different parts, with different structures.
Not too scientific I’m afraid but maybe useful.
And I am sure that if you were to offer people a dollar as a reward each time they bring back a trash to a trashcan, the parks would be clean.
In Berlin glass bottles are reused and there is a reward for bringing them back to specific bins. I have seen homeless people looking for trash and filling carts of these.
It is not only homeless, people with very low pensions or not able to get a proper full time job also hunt for them, everywhere.
On the streets, trains, subway, beach, lakes, you name it.
To the point that many people don't throw away bottles anymore, leaving them grouped outside the trash cans, as means to help those people pick them without messing with trash.
There are even trash cans in the Rhein region that have bottle holders around them.
So yeah it helps keep the street clean from bottles, but fighting the causes of this 2nd level economy would probably be a better idea.
I guess eating them isn't going to be good, but is picking them up and depositing them going to be poisonous to the crow?
https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_o...
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1. https://corvidresearch.blog/2015/03/12/a-scientists-thoughts...
The motivational part is after all a bit orthogonal to the intelligence claim. So the answer to the question "could we teach crows to do this?" might instead be "absolutely, however wild crows choose not to participate". Which is quite different depending on which viewpoint you have.
The other anecdotes from that talk are still valid and equally fascinating.
Can't recommend that talk any more though, at least not without preceding it with the information you linked...