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Crow Solves An 8-Step Puzzle To Get Food!
- Thread starter LIVEFRMNYC
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Brilliant. That was absolutely fantastic, extraordinarily interesting and quite wonderful to watch, and the problem solving skills of the (chosen) crow were most impressive.
Thank you for posting it.
I'm finding myself questioning the wisdom behind the decision to train these birds to utilize their brains to their full potential. Crows are fairly social animals. If you train one and let it loose out into the wild, it might train other crows to do the same things.
Next thing you know, you've got murders flying around jimmying windows open to steal cornmeal.
Next thing you know, you've got murders flying around jimmying windows open to steal cornmeal.
I think most birds are pretty smart, and decent problem solvers. I once had a Amazon Parrot and that bird was super smart.
Ordinary songbirds do seem smart as well, but they also tend to be sort of like Luca Brasi in The Godfather: remember how he kept rehearsing his intended speech to the godfather on Connie's wedding day, starting over whenever he bobbled a line?
I mean they are good at what they do, like building a nest or fetching things for their babies to eat, but if they're interrupted somehow, a lot of birds seem to have to start routines over from scratch. They seem unable to just resume from where they left off.
A phoebe that lives in my woodshed sits on my garden fence in spring and summer, waiting for some tasty insect to fly by. If she drops it after she nails it, she doesn't go get it from the ground but returns to the fence to wait for another insect. Maybe that's just caution about becoming vulnerable on the ground, but sometimes in a cold spring the wait is long and you kind of wonder why she wouldn't think to drop down and grab the thing off the grass the way I've seen barn swallows do.
I tried to dissuade a wren from building her nest in the gutter of my walk-in coldframe one year. She picked a spot three or four inches from the downspout, towards which the gutter is slightly sloped. Duh. So I took the twigs out of there and put them up on the coldframe roof so she could take them somewhere else. She ignored them, fetched new twigs and rebuilt in the same spot. OK, so no more Ms. NicePerson; I took those tiwgs and the other ones and threw them all on the ground. She brought new twigs and rebuilt in the gutter again...
Finally I took a foot-long piece of gutter plastic and nailed it into the roof of the coldframe about two feet away from the gutter, at a bit of an angle to let water drain from it. Then I piled some plastic bags and some crumpled paper trash into the real gutter as a temporary deterrent. She fetched new twigs and finally built in the substitute gutter, but meanwhile, talk about OCD. She had gathered enough twigs in total to build a castle, but in her mind the right way to make a nest was to go fetch some stuff from somewhere else, not to use stuff nearby, not even stuff she had already rounded up in a previous effort!
Some birds are just the opposite, they seem to think nothing of grabbing a nest some other bird built last season and just lay in some stuff on top to make it cozy. Then there are birds like killdeer that will lay their eggs in a pile of stones in your driveway if you allow it! Them I really wonder about. I mean how they have managed to keep their species going? They have that instinct to fake a broken wing and drag themselves around in some direction away from their nest if a dog or fox comes by, hoping to distract the predator from noticing the "nest" but really, to lay their eggs on the ground in plain view just seems daft.