A bird feeder that accepts bottle caps for food
boredpanda.com
boredpanda.com
I will never forget how one morning, on my regular run, i saw a group of magpies on the ground, right beside the road. There were 4 magpies forming a line, they were looking at two other magpies just in front of them. One of the two magpies appeared to be dead - was laying flat on the ground, while the other one was on top of it, sort of like in a triumphant fashion. Victor and defeated. The victorious magpie was the only one "talking", appearing to be giving a speech, while the rest were listening. What it was proclaiming, it's anyone's guess. Never seen anything more glorious with my own eyes.
Perhaps it was a eulogy?
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/10/151003-anima...
I'm really fortunate to live directly under their flight path to a massive roosting site in east Vancouver. Every day at dusk, there is a crow highway in the sky. They are fascinating creatures.
I've seen that, big flocks of crows flying somewhere every evening.
Where do they go?
More than once I've wanted to follow them.
>Magpies are amazing...
When out walking one night a few years back, I was lucky enough to find a baby jackdaw on the ground that must have fallen from its nest. It was completely cold and not moving. I picked it up and was about to discard it again, thinking it was dead, when I noticed its claw twitch slightly. So I cupped it in my hands to warm it and took it home with me and gradually nursed it back to health.
It stayed with me for about a year or more and even came on a couple of camping holidays round Ireland and Wales with me. I became quite a tourist attraction, as I'd be walking along a beach or in some countryside and suddenly this bird would appear as if from nowhere and land on my shoulder. passers by would be gobsmacked and ask to take a photo of the crazy bird man.
As the jackdaw got older, it got more independent and would go flying off for longer and longer periods until, one day it flew off to join another group of jackdaws in a park and never came back.
One of my coolest memories ever was one night me and the missus had gone out to dinner. The jackdaw had flown off somewhere, earlier in the day and not come back. When we returned home around midnight we found it fast asleep in its cage in the living room. It had come home, found us not there and let itself in through the cat-flap and went to bed, all by itself. Even though it had always been 'free' in the sense it never had a door on its cage and was free to fly off wherever and whenever it wanted, somehow that incident really touched me as it was like the bird was telling me that it considered our house its home too.
Absolutely amazing creatures and so intelligent. I read once that corvids have similar amounts of neurons in their brains to small monkeys but the folding of the corvid brain is more complex, so those neurons fit into a smaller brain volume. After having the privilege of spending that amount of time with one 'close up' I can certainly believe it.
I was once lucky in finding a baby sparrow who could not fly yet, but who was cut off from their nesting site and parents.
This sparrow would recognize me and come back to me after hanging out in the park for a day.
"Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz." (31 letters)
A perfect pangram contains every letter of the alphabet only once and can be considered an anagram of the alphabet.
I volunteer at a raptor conservation site where most of the birds are free-flown every few days. It is extremely rare for a bird not to come back 'home' of its own accord. There is one bald eagle (fitted with telemetry) who sometimes flies a couple of miles away and then waits to be collected and driven back in a van. The storks literally walk back along a path from one of the displays to their own aviary.
Being fed by the keepers is obviously a factor in them coming back, but it is also worth bearing in mind that for some birds (e.g. a Peregrin falcon) a hunting flight is an extremely energy-intensive activity, a bit like a cheetah sprinting after a gazelle. Such birds in the wild might spend a lot of time perched in a tree waiting for an easy kill, rather than flying just because they can.
Coming back to crows, one respect in which they seem to cognitively outperform dogs is that they understand traffic and vehicles. Crows eating roadkill will hop out of the way when a vehicle passes, and then hop right back when the road is clear again.
I’ve tried to rescue small birds (sparrows, robins, finches) that my cat has caught – but hasn’t killed – despite having two bells on his collar. I found that they either recovered quickly and were able to fly away after a couple of hours or else they died – more often than not. :(
I searched (DDG) for “cat saliva toxic to birds” and I found this very informative article [1] on the subject of rescuing birds from cats (also bringing the topic back to corvids). It concurs with what you say
> Regardless whether injuries have been found or not, every cat caught bird requires antibiotic treatment.
But more distressingly, it goes on to say that
> Releasing a seemingly uninjured cat caught bird or animal without pain relief and antibiotic treatment is therefore irresponsible and cruel, and will condemn the animal to prolonged suffering and death.
Now I know better. I’ll have to try getting a louder or more sensitive bell that makes it harder for the cat to creep up on its prey. The cat hasn’t brought back any birds or mice in the past couple of months but I don’t know whether that’s because it’s harder to catch prey at this time of year or because he has learned that we’ll just take the injured animal from him and keep him upstairs whenever he does.
My recent episode was on a trail when I startled a field mouse that was clueless to an imminent garden snake pounce. The snake reared up and noticed me, but the attention was focused completely on its escaping breakfast.
I had likely interrupted an hour long stalk and could detect annoyance in its exit slither.
But basically, he covered the surface with bottle caps and a slot they birds could knock the caps into and it would feed them. They'd knock the caps in accidentally, and get food. He learned in an earlier experiment where they had to press a button to get food that the button had to be relatively close to the food. There was an even earlier step where he just fed them randomly to get them interested in the feeder in the first place.
They're very trainable animals. Smarter than my dog it seems. They're much more willing to experiment and seem to learn very quickly. Training my current dog requires tons of patience. He experiments very little while alternately repeating a behavior I'm trying to extinguish. I have to work with him in extremely small steps. Very sweet, but oh so hard to train.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-particl...
Either way, great read for a Sunday.
Lots of insightful videos on how he builds his devices and trains the birds to use them. For example, a simpler device where pressing a red button dispenses food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alpCl6xDSRU
You'd need to make sure the exchange rate (food per trash) is set based on the weight of the trash in order to avoid incentivizing the birds from tearing trash into smaller pieces for more food. And you might need some decent machine vision to reject non trash. Seems eminently solveable though.
Animals (specifically corvids) don't measure things by weight and determine an exchange rate, they just look at them with a 1:1 ratio and check for similarity.
In this particular set up, they would simply correlate food with particular types of trash that they have been trained with and dump only those kinds of trash into the apparatus. To them, tearing up the trash would be more effort than finding new trash.
Once they figure out what the reward system is, they often try to figure out how it can be gamed.
A crow at the beginning of this talk figured out how to bend a metal wire to use as a tool when a straight wire wouldn't work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fiAoqwsc9g&t=17s
And the crow in this video figures out how to drink water at the bottom of a bottle by displacing it with pebbles.
You assume that to corvids, tearing the trash into two is an easier task to experiment with. It's not. Corvids, just like smarter humans, look for the easiest way to do something. Like another one of the children comments to mine says, they would rather find another way to "reuse" the trash, perhaps by finding some opening to the trash storage, or finding a nearby huge stash of trash which was not the objective, such as a landfill, or experimenting with other materials to see if they work (the reason why mechanical contraptions would barely work with magpies, etc. but would work with most other birds).
Apparently, a dolphin Kelly discovered the exchange rate to be one fish per one piece of paper... thus tearing a larger piece of paper into smaller parts, and getting a reward for each small piece. They 'gamed' the exchange rate into their advantage.
> This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming.
It's only a matter of time before they implement a tax system to finance a police operation.
> Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.sci...
He gave a TED talk about it back in 2008:
https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_a_thought_experiment_...
Although I seem to remember reading that the vending machine never worked as well as the inventor said.
I know one of the people who worked alongside Klein (and Unidan) at Binghamton U. She says wild crows are highly neophobic and it's hard to train them to accept the presence of a big machine and do stuff with it. (Our conversation was quite a few years ago so I'm a bit vague.) There was a lot of academic disagreement and fallout when Klein went forward with his Ted talk and made the experiment out to be much more exciting than it was.
Based on my childhood memories of feeding birds, I don't expect the birds getting full would be a major concern.
Besides, the amount of bottle caps the magpies in the experiment would be able to find in the wild would be a limiting factor keeping them on their toes.
So if you want to train a dog or other animal with a clicker or just with treats, the optimal strategy is probably not to give them treats every time they do the behavior.
It's an incredibly powerful effect.
Slot machines and the "smart" social media timelines (rather than pure chronological) are the apotheosis of this in humans. Switching both Facebook and Twitter to pure chronological view makes them way less addictive as the element of surprise is all but eliminated on most people's timelines. The platform no longer presents you with something different each time you pull down to refresh.
Pretty clever.
Because that's all I see in the city where I live, pigeons, pigeons, and more pigeons.
Sure there are corvids too, seagulls of course near the sea, but if any food is outside pigeons will flock to this spot.
I guess magpies are one of the few birds that can figure out how to get the actual food so the others won't bother.
But I assume there's a training stage where you actually have to teach the magpies about the food by leaving some out for them.
Corvids can be trained by "showing" them how it works and they can teach other birds how to use it. So you may not need to "leave out" food for just any bird but wait for crow or other corvid, show them how to use it, and then let them spread the word.
[0]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2982961/The-...
obviously money for food, if magpies find money on the ground they bring it to you, get food.
soda cans for food.
I was thinking lottery tickets for food, but probably not that worthwhile.
Also, turning in a lottery ticket you didn't actually purchase may be considered fraud. (Obviously depends on location.)
IIRC, video surveillance showed that it wasn't them who had purchased the ticket. (Or at least that they couldn't have.)
I don't necessarily agree with it, but that is the law in some countries/jurisdictions.
https://www.hackster.io/hfor62/training-wild-birds-to-trade-...
I find this so amazing. Thinking what else cigarette butts, small plastic... How does system differentiate that birds does not cheat bringing all kind of small parts, woodchips, branches and similar ?
I'm sorry, it was right there.
Not to mention the filter is designed to trap tar, nicotine and other carcinogens.
From Wikipedia: "Children who ingest 6 cigarette butts, or a total of 0.5 mg/kg of nicotine should be admitted to a hospital." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_filter#Health_risks
Crows weigh ~1kg and cigarette butts ~5mg, i.e. ingesting a single cigarette butt is 10 times what would send a human to hospital.
This assumes that humans and crows are physiologically identical, which they are not. Are the affected by tobacco in the same manner? How much do they end up injesting from the typical butt?
I accept that this is partially relevant, but:
Since humans choose to consume tobacco, and animals including birds generally won't (hence tobacco plants are becoming invasive), if anything we should expect humans to have a higher tolerance and crows to have a relatively lower tolerance for tobacco products.
Is your point that it should be considered ethical until your questions have been exhausted? That isn't a good standard of ethics.
Not at all. I agree with your point. I was just pointing out that the math isn't very accurate.