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Yes, rather than exchange rate, I'd be more worried about corvids carrying trash from the landfill to exchange it to food. Or, in case of cigarette stubs, emptying well contained ashtrays to the tables and floors only to get to those valuable stubs.

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This is more likely actually. Corvids tend to lean towards gaming the system in other ways, like breaking into the trash store and re-dumping the trash repeatedly (like the Indians did with snakes during the British Raj and the Vietnamese did with rats during French rule).

I blame being an operations researcher for always (pessimistically) first and foremost seeing how the system can be gamed. You have to think very very carefully what the objective function is and which kind of undesired solutions need to be forbidden using the constraints.

Guess Corvids are operations researchers then. :)

Once they figure out what the reward system is, they often try to figure out how it can be gamed.

Yes, obviously this is possible. The extent to which it's actually a problem is easy to test. Where I live, it's already necessary to tightly close trash can lids to keep crows and racoons from rooting through it for food.

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