I’m surprised no one has attempted to train crows for use in asymmetrical warfare. At least before the advent of cheap drones.
I was wondering about the opposite too. Could you train a crow to watch you throw a marker, say a pebble of specific color, and then fly to the location it landed to perform specific action? Say, if we go for personal mischief instead of warfare:
- red marker = find whatever interesting object there is (e.g. man-made things it can carry, or money), and fetch it;
- blue marker = grab a payload from you and deposit it at location (e.g. a piece of paper, a "stinky bomb")
- orange marker = hover over location for a while, or explore it (useful with e.g. crow-mounted camera; throw marker over a fence or on a roof, get footage of place you can't get to)
- violet marker = make noise, scare away meanest looking people or animals near target (say, to chase away partying college students that decided to occupy the nearby children playground before sundown, or to remind the neighbor blasting his car radio at 5:30 in the morning that there exists small children, or decency, or noise rules) (both totally random hypothetical scenarios, yes); alternatively, to patrol the area for a while and make noise if people show up;
- rose marker = find nearest switch or lever, flick it;
Etc.
Of course the crow would need to be trained to fetch the marker back after executing the action, as to prevent accidental repeat actions, make markers reusable, and ensure there's no evidence left behind :).
One of my favorite nature vignettes, is a part of Planet Earth, by the BBC, about Cape Hunting Dogs[0]. It looks like a military assault. They are really clever, and work well, as a team.
But if you could train crows, they would probably be marvelous.
So, I don't expect it's easy to train crows like dogs and pigeons, where one person "pre-trains" them and gives/sells them to someone else. But I think it should be possible to "train" a crow for yourself - bond with it and have it voluntarily indulge you reliably enough that it's pretty much like training.
for that literal reason, they are illegal to keep as pets in srilanka
I watched a video earlier today on a YT channel I follow called Curious Droid. This episode went into how the U.S military had a hard time determining vietcong troop movements due to the thick jungle foilege. So DARPA developed this concept of electronic fenses, where the airforce would drop these sensor packages into the jungle. The package would have sesmic sensors and microphones to capture movement of enemy forces through the jungle. The problem was that this being the 1960s/70s - the batteries only lasted couple of weeks. Also data storage and tranmission rates weren't advance enough at the time to send that information to a centralize location far from the contested area. So they had to have an aircraft loitering above to collect this data and then fly the collected data to a processing facility in Thailand. By the time the data was classified and analyized, the intelligence collected wasn't really actionable for the commanders in the field.
Here is the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feDk6oaeVAY
> Yet in spite of considerable progress in recent years, many details are still unclear, among them details of the radical pair processes and their transformation into a nervous signal, the precise location of the magnetite-based receptors and the centres in the brain where magnetic information is combined with other navigational information for the navigational processes.
1. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-egypt-pigeon-p...
https://www.military-history.org/feature/pigeon-guided-missi...