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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever exchanged a look with a stranger and their expression was such that you immediately got a deep impression of their inner life, of their humanity, and felt a connection? That happened to me with a raven, while we were both enjoying a stunning view of a sunset at Petrified Forest National Park. It was a large, old, rumpled, wise seeming creature.

Surely that environment primed me for the experience. The mostly likely explanation is that I had a kind of moral hallucination. But it's changed the way I've seen ravens since. I attribute self awareness to them. When they caw what I hear is laughing ... at a ground bound inferior like me.

Reading _Mind_of_the_Raven_ only reinforced this feeling.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254704.Mind_of_the_Raven

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For me, it was watching them play for hours outside the office. Sometimes a pair would fly together for awhile, then one would dive at the other, who would flip over at the last instant. There was no reason for them to do this; they just had enough free time to screw around.

That's a sure sign you are watching ravens, not crows. Ravens can play together in the air in ways crows never do.

Ravens are apparently one of the smartest animals.[1]

[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/ravens-problem-s...

Also crows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSu2PXOTOc

Seems like the crow is "just" solving the problems independently (with which it has previous experience), rather than thinking multiple steps ahead.

Corvids in general.

The New Caledonia Crow is getting a lot of study for its puzzle-solving abilities.

This video of a crow repeatedly "skiing" down a roof changed my view of how animals play - I thought it was all "practice-fighting" but this crow seems to be playing "just for the fun of it".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WupH8oyrAo

This is a hooded crow hammering / trying to kill what probably thinks is a prey. Seems more frustrated than happy. The easiest crow to identify in Europe, being gray and black.

How about these? When they roll on their backs down a snowy slope, are they playing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7GmYJnUtsY

Killing mites on their body is a common explanation or maybe it's fun.

How about this video, are they playing? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C59YIwMcg3Y

This is neither a crow nor a raven (not even a corvidae). A clever and very good singing bird in the family Artamidae

This looks like playing time to me, yup

A few years back I was at lunch in the courtyard at work and a little, somewhat runtish crow kept coming up and standing right next to me. I eventually worked out that he was doing it because a bigger crow was harassing him, but he knew the bigger crow was afraid of me.

I wonder if the story of Elijah, who, according to the Bible received food from some ravens, could have some seed of truth?

Kings 17:2-6 “2 Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah: 3 “Leave here, turn eastward and hide in the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan. 4 You will drink from the brook, and I have directed the ravens to supply you with food there.”

5 So he did what the Lord had told him. He went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there. 6 The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook.”

Scott Alexander has a good post on bird intelligence here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligen...

Though they have much smaller brains, there is evidence to suggest that their brains are 10x more computationally dense.

Birds are on a better process.

Maybe cooling is also a factor, so we are constrained by our brain's surface area.

To some extent brain "power" goes with surface area, right? Granted the surface is highly folded in 3 dimensions. But I think larger brains have a lot more "non thinking" matter to support the complexity of maintaining a larger neural network. On the other hand, effective thinking-power may be superlinear in neuron count. Or perhaps sublinear.

Recently finished an interesting survey of bird intelligence (speech, navigation, social order, etc.): https://www.jenniferackermanauthor.com/genius-ofbirds

When talking about brain power like this, I don't often see people mention the costs of simply driving a more complicated body. Birds are physically simpler than humans (no hands, fairly simple feet/legs) so maybe they just spend less overhead on motor skills and associated control?

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