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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

Crows are amazingly intelligent animals.

My GF and I went to the beach about a month ago and took our dog.

The crows weren't frightened at ALL of our dog. They realized they could basically just 'float' up in the air when he came by using the breeze.

The fact that they were amazingly calm about it was really telling.

Second. We hid our stuff under a blanket. They realize it's still there as they have item persistence. So they lifted up the blanket, went into our bag, then started opening up everything.

They opened up lids. They went through my girlfriends purse. They took out all the items from her purse. They took the socks out of my shoes. They opened plastic containers.

They systematically went through all our belongings.

And BOY did they score. All our dogfood. All of our leftover lunch, etc.

View on HN

Yeap. Food and valuables have to be toddler-proofed around crows. They can also steal your wallet or your keys if you leave them unsecured.

And, damn, they're as good as human thieves at reading situations for opportunism.

I saw a crow steal a credit card off an outdoor table in Seattle once. They really are remarkable animals. Also I swear they have regional accents to their calls.

I wonder if they know how to use ATMs

I await a birds nest made from $20 bills.

Take a picture of that, write “capitalism” underneath then bring it to an art gallery and you’re rich.

Here in Australia most people now buy food and drink by tapping their bank cards on a reader. Can't be long now until a particularly smart crow sees this at a beach side shop, and steals a card to copy this. Is a shopkeeper obligated to serve other species? I for one will welcome our new flying thief overlords.

Joshua Klein built a crow vending machine with some success (using coins). Tap to pay could be quite a bit more profitable, though I assume you'd have a pretty high chargeback rate.

http://www.josh.is/crow-machine/

His research claims have been disputed, and an initially favorable NYT story about him ended up being retracted. I think he probably can't be cited anymore as a credible source on the question of crow intelligence.

I think I saw a video of some bird puzzle where they have to tap the right thing with their beak to get a treat. It doesn't seem too far removed from entering a PIN code. I bet you could teach them to do that.

Also, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think they would learn to insert a credit card into the machine given that they're good at manipulating sticks and stones and putting them into places.

Tapping buttons on a vending machine and then tapping a contactless bank card seems like the most promising route for a crow to buy food.

If this video is to be believed, they understand the concept of using a card at an ATM, but can't quite grasp exactly what to do:

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

To be fair, when ATMs were first introduced here, most people struggled to use them too

> Also I swear they have regional accents to their calls.

Its actually true they do this. Two noted ornithologist's describes it in one of their books on crows:

As ornithologist John M. Marzluff and author Tony Angell noted in their 2005 book In the Company of Crows and Ravens, the calls these birds use "vary regionally, like human dialects that can vary from valley to valley." And there's more: If a crow changes its social group, the bird will try to fit in by talking like the popular guys. "When crows join a new flock," Marzluff and Angell wrote, "they learn the flock's dialect by mimicking the calls of dominant flock members."

I live in an area that's got crows and ravens -- the ravens don't come into the city much, except for large forested parks. The crows in such parks have a few calls similar to the ravens. To me, it sounds like a rural dialect -- which is reinforced by my observations that crows don't seem to talk like that in noisier parts of the city.

Oh I learned this the hard way after a crow flew off with my money clip at the beach...

I was in Nepal having breakfast. Some crows are sitting there watching me eat. I look down to read my book, and in not more than a few seconds, I hear the clinking of dishes. I look up and the crows are flying off with my toast and jam. It was right in front of me, but they were quick enough to get in and out before I could react.

I realized that they are probably aware of my lack of attention to my food and that their in-built modeling of other agents had given them an advantage in this situation. I thought it was pretty impressive.

I sat and watched a raven (majestic and BIG, if you've never seen one) at Yellowstone Park for a few minutes.

It was a big parking lot outside the gift shop, and some visitor had parked his motorcycle there. Pannier bags on the back.

The raven was sitting on one bag, actively working the zipper open. About a foot of zipper.

Which is pretty impressive, but the more impressive thing was how.

It would worry it for a couple seconds, tugging it a bit farther open, then stop, lift its head, and evaluate its surroundings.

If it didn't see anyone nearby, again with the zipper.

... I gained a new level of respect for corvids that day.

Ravens are pretty awesome. They can even say, "hi"

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

Speaking of corvids. Magpies are ones of the more social birds, I'm always amazed how vocal and varied their communications are. You could teach them to speak simple phrases. They can engage in gang violence (especially between two groups of juveniles). Magpies can establish "friendship" with crows if it helps them scavenge food.

I once watched three ravens raid a McDonald's trash can.

Two of them held the "flap" open, and the third went in for fries. Once they'd made a decent pile on the ground outside the can, they all set in to feast.

Does level of intelligence determine how much respect you give something then?

I had lunch with a crow in Austin once! It was my favorite experience. I was having pizza on an outside table on 3rd/2nd ave, and a Crow was standing nearby looking at me, probably waiting until I finished so it could swoop in on the left-overs. I motioned it to come closer, left a bit of pizza on top of the table, and it flew up on the table with me. Then I'd munch on a bite, tear off a piece for the crow, and it would eat the piece. Went like that for like 20 minutes before I had to get back to work, but it was so cute. I had a little crow buddy! :)

are you sure it wasn’t a grackle, being in Austin and all?

> their in-built modeling of other agents

Why do programmers talk about living beings in software terminology, it's so clinical and cold. Other species are sentient beings, but for many it helps combat cognitive bias by not thinking of them as such.

if it soothes you at all, we also talk about humans in the same cold clinical language. Hell, I talk about myself that way...

I've observed Grand Canyon South Rim is a great example. They actively work the tourists who make hand-to-mouth gestures and steal when items are unguarded. Their team strategizing while hacking bear-proof garbage cans is impressive, too. One handles the door/partition while one or more enters for the snacks. I spent 1/2 a day watching them.

Gulls are pretty smart too. I've seen a flock case out a tourist as they set up their beach blanket. Once the tourist turns their back, they swoop in.

I've seen a one pull a closed brown lunch bag out of a freshly opened backpack, meaning the knew backpacks probably have food and brown bags are worth stealing and inspecting in detail elsewhere.

I was at a beach where I was younger where people routinely fed the fish dog food. The fish had learned to recognize this and would swarm the person feeding them. The gulls in turn would actually step on the fish to get to the food.

Clearly, gulls are the honey badger of the bird world!

My wife grew up here in IL, we were visiting New England where I grew up and spent a day on Hampton Beach, her, I, and my daughter.

They started a game of using McD's french fries as lures to get the beach gulls to swoop in on unsuspecting kids as they were playing... sometimes 20 or 30 gulls at a time.

Felt like dropping spotter rounds for airstrikes.

(No children were harmed, just many french fries tossed instead of consumed.)

I wonder how kea (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea) compared to crows in terms of intelligence. I’ve heard those things are more than capable of breaking into vehicles.

They are also known to steal anvils. [1]

[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Kea

I remember seeing a program a while back which was comparing crows and kea and they concluded the kea was marginally smarter. Although, of course, that's related to the specific test they set - different tests might yield different results. They definitely are smart, tho

No animal is more a thief than the monkey gang up on The Rock of Gibraltar

They probably learned it from the seagulls. or at least traded techniques :)

search for "seagull thief" videos.

That reminds me of the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park: "Unless they figure out how to open doors." :)

In times when I'm in evil-overlord mode, I want to remove all lever-sets and replace them with doorknobs covered in toddler-spinny-thingies.

Doorknobs are not ADA compliant any longer, but if you are on a private island with utah-raptors? knobs.

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