"CROWS REMEMBER, REASON AND REDEFINE INTELIGENCE" with Kaeli Swift

In this episode, Kaylee Swift joins me.

“She's a corporate researcher, and I call her if it does.”

The Jane Goodall and Corvins. Now, what's Corvins? It's everything, Crow, Raven, Jay's, Magpie's, and Nutcrackers. She is so, so insightful. And these Corvins.

They're all intelligent in their own ways. So here's a question for you. How do we actually define intelligence and animals? We do a deep dive into this.

And first, let's talk a little bit about Crows.

Now have you ever heard about Crow Funerals? If you haven't, it's fascinating, and it's definitely not what you think it is. When Crow dies, several Crow's will actually fly down and surround her dead friend. Now it's been established, they're actually studying it, to learn what may have happened to the friend, so in the future, possibly they can prevent whatever danger or threat it may

represent. Crazy smart, right?

“Did you know Crow's can actually recognize individual faces and remember them for years?”

Then they'll actually go and tell their friends, hey, but human guy over there, he's mean watch out for more than human girl over there. She's really kind, so don't worry about her. Now get this. There are Crow's in Japan that actually get nuts, and they fly over, they drop it on

their road, and then you wait for cars to run over them, and then they can go down and eat them. Now we also talk about the difference between a Raven and Crow.

You know how Crow's in Raven seem always to be in people's attentions from Edgar Allan

Poe to Brandon Lee in the movie The Crow? Well, we talk all Corbett in this episode, and there's a lot. So get ready for murder's to cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, cause, cause. This one will have you telling the rest of your flock how smart these birds really are. For real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real, for real.

We've got a bunch of furry friends and I love them all to say, hey, I'm an animal of a veteran area in this the name. They share some pastories from Heartwarming Stray, houses and games from Wacky to a Say, for real. You're now tuned in to Frill, with your host, Mark Kyle. Everybody, and welcome back to the Frill podcast today. My guest is Kaylee Swift, and guess what, guys, we're going to have fun today.

There's a lot of people out there, when they hear this, all of them, by the way, Kaylee, even before you start talking. When I really started doing my homework after we talked last time, there's so many questions I have for you. This is going to be a really funny, first of all.

“Thanks for joining this show, and I can't wait for everybody here, everything you have to say.”

Well, thanks for having me on, I'm excited to talk, Crow. Yeah, well, we're going to talk a lot of Crow, and I'll probably be eating some Crow at some point in the same time.

But like I always do on this show, I really want to talk about you first.

Everybody gets to know you. I know you grew up a year in Seattle, you grew up in that area, but let's talk about that and how you got to where we are today. Kind of a little bit of your journey, your fascination with Corvids and all that kind of stuff. And whatever you want to talk about, so everybody gets to know you. Sure, so I grew up with a very strong interest in birds and animals.

You know, I was a, I was a naturey kid. I didn't, I wasn't a super academic kid, so this career path was not something that I really envisioned for myself, because I just didn't have a very strong academic performance. And it took a long time and a lot of very hard dedicated work to sort of figure out how to exist in a system that wasn't really defined or designed for people with brains like mine. But I got there eventually and once I got to college, I actually went to college sort of wanting to go more marine direction.

I was really interested in cephalopods and that kind of thing, but I, not apparently, I wasn't interested enough in that that I picked a school that had any semblance of a marine program. So then I had to, I pivoted and kind of returned to birds, which is something that I was really interested in as a kid. And in my exploration of birds, I started to read more about the work that was being done on Corvids, reading authors like burned Heinrich and John Marslev and that just kind of really cemented my understanding that working with Corvids was going to be the best way to be able to ask a lot of the questions that I was interested in.

I love Corvids, but really what I love is asking questions about animal behavior.

And at the time, Corvids were really great option for that because they're really accessible critter, right?

“So, and I was fortunate and lucky enough that my connections at William University, which is where I did my undergrad, the faculty David Craig that I was working with there, new John Marslev.”

They were co-authoring a paper together that actual the facial recognition paper that a lot of people are familiar with when they think about cross-recognizing faces. So he put us in touch and then I spent the next couple of years doing a variety of just kind of like mishmash jobs and working towards this goal of going to grad school to work with John, which I eventually succeeded doing.

And yeah, and then I got to really live out my dream, which was just to have this really focused research effort on crows for six years, I did my I did a dual masters PhD program.

“And yeah, that was wonderful and then after I graduated, I got to do a postdoc on candidates, which are relative of the crow, and now I am in a completely different group of birds called monarchs, which are small flycatchers, not crows.”

We could get into the specifics of that pivot maybe at some other time, but suffice it to say that there's not despite the sort of very high volume of public interest in crows, there's not actually a lot of long-term job prospects. There are some, but it's it's a harder thing to maintain through the entirety of one's professional career, though I am hopeful to sort of circle back to crowwork at some point I am a pretty early career scientist. Well, you're a writer too, so you're a lot of things, but you know, one for everybody's listening because they're in the, I, I know that there's a scientific world, which I can't pronounce probably, but another considered corvits, can you tell everybody what a corvit is other than a crow.

Yeah, that's a great question. So the corvit day family, if we, if we think about how we organize animals, right, we start it like these really, really big umbrellas, and then we narrow down until we get to the smallest unit that we divide animal. That we divide animals, which is a species, right? But above species is genus, and above genus is family. So the corvit day family contains the jays of the world, crows, ravens, rooks, jack does, netcrackers, chess, magpies, there's a whole variety of birds, including some types of birds that most North American residents are completely unfamiliar with.

There's types of corvits, you probably haven't ever even heard of before, that are like tropical species. So yeah, but you're, you're standard, blue jays, magpies, stellar jays, clerks, netcrackers, ravens, crows, they're all in the same corvit day family. You know what's weird is that? So when I was doing my homework, and I didn't know what a nutcracker was. I, you know, and I'm a bird person. I grew up, you know, I grew up in the Midwest, but Cardinals were always like one of my favorites, and of course, blue jays, even though they're mean, I always like blue jays, and even brought a random fall from a nest with baby feeding it brought it back to life and a bunch of different things.

But when I started digging into the nutcrackers, first of all, they're pretty, there's some really cool colors with them, but I've never even, you know, I know with the nutcracker is because, you know, there's a, you know, all the famous things songs and things like that, but I never, I didn't realize it was a bird, it was a nutcracker, and I love the idea what they do with seeds, which is really cool. I did, I didn't deep dive.

Yeah, yeah, they're, they're really interesting, and there's some really cool brain work that we've done with nutcrackers because

“they are for, they're listeners who aren't familiar with them, so some, I think a lot of us have, have contact in familiar, erydy with the idea that animals like hide food for later, right, like classic dog, hiding a bone.”

So, lots of animals, yeah, do that opportunistically, uh, crows are a good example of that, but some animals have to do it, because those resources become the only food that is available to them during winter. And nutcrackers are a really good example of a bird like that. Chickadies, not the ones in your, you know, typical urban neighborhood, but like a boreal chickadies, for example, are another type of bird that does that. And what that means is that these animals have to hide food in a lot of different places, because there's two strategies to food hiding.

It's called, um, larger hiding, where think about like a, a cornwood pecker, a pine squirrel, where they have everything in the same place, they just have this hole, it like a dragon, right, they have this hole that they defend.

So then the other option is what we call scatter hoarding, where instead of you putting everything in one place, you hide it at just individual pieces all over a fairly big area.

“And that's much better for protecting against getting robbed, but it means you have to remember all of those places.”

And these birds are have a remarkable capacity to remember thousands of hiding spots. And, you know, I think we're all sitting here thinking like, I can hardly remember where I put my keys in the morning kind of a thing. And so we can appreciate like, well, how do they do that? Yeah, yeah, I'm a person. I'm like, barely keeping it together. How does this bird remember a thousand hiding spots? And so there's been a lot of really interesting research, which it sounds like you tapped into that has tried to understand how that happens.

You know, for me, because I, you know, I was, my biggest deepest I was obviously into your background and also on on crows. And I was thinking a little bit of the similarity because we're going to get into the intelligence of crows.

“And because they're in the same family are all the in the family, the corporate family, did they really all have a real high intelligence, did all of them do like that because memories of intelligence do.”

That prompts a really interesting, but difficult question, which is how we define and measure intelligence, right? And like you just noted, there are lots of different sort of manifestations that we as people can perceive as intelligence. So when we're like, wow, that animal remembers a thousand hiding spots. That seems really smart, right? Like, is, is that what that means or like, here's a crow that knows how to like make tools and. Right. And the answer is is very complicated, but in general, we describe intelligence kind of the like, and this is not something that every scientist who works in this field agrees on there's no one set definition.

First of, I'm with you on this because I was reading all your stuff about them in your page. So we're getting it. We're going to go over it.

I really like what you're doing. I really do. I agree. Well, 100% with that. Yeah. So the kind of standard definition that's generally accepted is is the ability to flexibly solve problems with cognition rather than trial and error. And that leaves a lot of stuff out, but it kind of gives us a baseline. And when we think about how we test for that, we have identified. What's called the cognitive tool kit, which is a couple of different things that we have been able to identify and track as being things that are very consistently the result of kind of higher executive order thinking.

“As opposed to things that are more instinctive or learned through trial and error. And I know some people might hear that and go, well, what's wrong with trial and error learning. That's how I learned that seems like learning what's wrong with that.”

And we won't we won't get into the mess of all that, but just kind of go with me here and trust that that's a little bit. It's not as difficult as you may think. So there's a lot of like spiders, right? That can solve problems through trial and error learning. So then maybe that'll be like, okay, maybe she has point. But the things on that list are to put as well. So octopus are very smart. So the things that go on that list are things like causal reasoning. So this is a really big one where there's a lot of organisms that can produce really complex products, but they get there through really simple mechanisms and not because they actually understand how it works.

So my favorite example is like army ants, right? Army ants move through the jungle and when they hit an obstacle like a stream, they can build a bridge. Now, it's they don't build bridges because they have physics degrees or engineering degrees. They don't understand it, but they know how collectively through the process of immersion, they know collectively if each I have one single part of this job, and I do it. And when they all come together, you have a bridge, right? And so again, it's not to say understand how it all works. They just have a job and they execute on that job right versus when when an animal actually kind of understands the sequence of events and how they all fit together. So that's one example.

Another is mental time travel. So the ability to sort of reflect on past events, plan for future events, particularly in this is the third thing in a flexible way.

So do they execute their behaviors in a really rigid way, where sometimes if you change the components of it, suddenly what they're doing makes less sense because they only can do it in one way and so now the way they're doing it.

And so to circle back to the question that inspired this very long-winded explanation I've given you. When we talk about the different core vids, often what we see is some of them are really good at some of those things and less good at some of the other ones. Some of them seem to be like common ravens seem to be pretty good at all of them, right? And so there does seem to be a little bit of a scale where they're not all necessarily equally as good at kind of all of those components in our pseudo equation of intelligence, but some of them are much better at some of those components than the other ones are.

“That's why I would not say that all things are equal across these birds. For sure, I wouldn't say that that's true, but I would say that they in general are usually have one of those things in that toolkit that they're impressively good at.”

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It's always very leery whatever read on the internet, right, because that's where I get most of my research.

Now is a raven in a crow.

“What I read genetically, they're not really different, just once bigger than the other, are they the same thing?”

We just have two different names for them. That's a great question. They are different things.

Okay. And if you start cutting hairs, you know, we're not all that genetically different from a strawberry.

So, I'm more of a new bear in English. That when we start getting genetics like the amount of sort of hair splitting, but yes, so across the world. So earlier when we talked about sort of taxonomy and the smallest units that we splice animals into where species is generally the smallest unit that we define an animal. Across the world, there's about 45 different species of crows and ravens.

So in North America, for example, we have American crows, fish crows, common ravens,

Chihuahuan ravens. We used to have a crow called the Northwestern Crow. But after a lot of genetic and behavioral studies, we found that there wasn't really a warranted distinction anymore with the American crow. So they just kind of got enveloped with the American crow. But in other countries, you can have jungle crows. White next ravens, carrying crows, right? There's a huge diversity of species.

“What gets a little confusing now is when somebody asks, what's the difference between a crow and a raven?”

Most of the time, they're asking you to explain the difference between their local species of crows and raven. Right? So when somebody asks me that question, they're often asking, like, if I'm looking at a bird in Washington, am I looking at an American crow or common raven? And that has a really clear answer, where these are different animals, and we can look at features of their voices, behavior, their appearance, identify the differences between these birds. But the other way that you could ask this question

is when, say a scientist or a person discovers a new bird, how do we know if we're going to call that bird a crow or a raven? Right. And the answer to that question is that there isn't a answer. There's no sort of defining thing that is like, this is a crow, and this is going to be called something raven. In general, and this speaks to what you're kind of getting at,

a really big bird, it should have probably been called the Hawaiian raven. But it's an arbitrary distinction at that level.

“Okay. So as a scientist discovered a bird, they knew a crow, and if it was a small one, they called it a crow,”

but if they knew what a raven is, they called it exactly a Hawaiian raven or a crow, whatever, because

basically genetically, there's the same, but they're different birds, for the most part,

am I right there? No, they're not genetically the same. Okay. Because that's a big, and species, the term species, and this often surprises people, is also one of those terms that has no set definition in science. I'm like, I'm like on species, I'll tell you that much. How we define species is a constantly debated thing. Right. But in general, one of the features that is across the various definitions we have for how we define species, one of the consistent sort of components of that is genetic differences.

Okay. So they are genetically, they are genetically different animals,

and that, you know, the American crow is just like a lion and a tiger, right? They're both cats.

Okay. But like you look at a tiger and you're like, that's different than a lion. Sure. And crow's and ravens have the exact same relationship where they're in the same genus. So we've been talking a lot about family level, which is Corbide, but the next level down is genus, and for crow's and ravens that's Corbis. And Corbis only contains crow's and ravens.

“The magpies, jays, nutcrackers, they get their own, they're in their own genus, right?”

And there are a bunch of different ones. But all of the world's crow's and ravens are in the same genus called Corbis. And then we get to the species level, tigers and lions are in the same thing. They're in the same genus, but they're different animals, they're different species. No leopard versus whatever. Actually, it was funny. It's just no leopard's closer to a tiger than it is. Other leopard's. Did you know that? Yeah. That's pretty cool. I just did an episode.

So I have a question. I want to stay on the crow's. It is about crow's, but I'm going to bounce. I think I told you when we talked before. This is how my mind works. One of the things I read and I'm curious why that is. So what I read was the crows are not in South America or in Antarctica. Why don't they in South America?

“Is there any theory behind that? I mean, at least that's what I read.”

Yeah. It probably has to do with the sort of evolutionary path of these birds through the world, where they started in Africa and then they have sort of come across the northern hemisphere, dropped into North America. And then, yeah, it just seems like they just didn't quite make that that geographical leap. And probably it was something about the competition that was present.

Maybe there's some geographic barriers. Although we know these animals live in basically every ecosystem.

Ravens can do just as well on the desert as they can in the high mountains. And the winter time. But there was some barrier. And I, there's probably folks that have a better understanding of this than I do. Because I haven't, I've mostly been focused on kind of like the behavioral part of these animals as opposed to like the evolutionary taxonomy part. But that's my sort of general understanding. I mean, I understand when they're not in a country like, you know, like coming birds aren't in, I don't think they're in England, right? But that makes sense more to

me when South America, they could eventually migrate down. But again, I'm off track. Let's talk closer more. So, can you tell me, but I was really surprised how big their wingspan to small ones are even, how big they are. And then, then I want to get into the intelligence, all the different things. How you study inverses, the lab rat studying people do, and all that, which I love, by the way. So can we just kind of just bounce around and you go your direction and I'll just kind of keep my mouth shut once my mouth.

Sure. So, one thing that might surprise folks is that, again, apparently we're going to spend a lot of time on the taxonomic tree. But so, grows and ravens are songbirds. And ravens are actually common ravens are the biggest songbird in the world. And like you mentioned, they are really big birds. And so, often when people ask me, how do I tell the difference between a crow or a raven?

Depending on your city, it might not be. It could be a raven, but probably it's a crow.

“And so, I often tell people, when you do see your first raven, you are going to know because it's going to be so much bigger than you are used to.”

And when you do a crazer, it's like big birds. They're very robust birds. But ravens are like red tail hoc size bird. It's going to feel like a raptor in a lot of ways. And so, they are, they're big animals. I mean, you know, you strip them down and realize there's actually not as much various one might think.

But, you know, when they've got their full feather costume on, they are big and pretty powerful birds.

“Yeah, because I think, I mean, the crows can, I mean, they're small wings are like two and a half feet or something.”

And I didn't realize they could be that big, but I got, I've seen raven. So I've seen up in Canada and particularly there's a lot of ravens like there and I've seen some really big ones. But let's, let's this bypass that and get on to the intelligence and how you study them and what you've learned and I mean, it's fascinating.

They're so smart and, and just their traits and whatever you want to do for people to really understand and demystify them, which is to you.

Yeah, so we already talked a little bit about kind of how we define intelligence and some of the features that we're looking for. And so a lot of people are kind of generally familiar with the fact that these birds are smart.

“And so I think some good background to kind of tack on to that is to understand why that is a surprise, right?”

Because for for a lot of folks, they're either coming to that being like, oh really, I didn't, I kind of thought that we that birds like weren't very smart or feeling a little indignant that like you could possibly question that. So both of those come from the same place, which is that for a very, very long time Western science didn't understand didn't sort of give birds enough credit and there was was a couple of reasons for that. One was that a lot of the early behavioral work that was done on birds was done on species that aren't don't don't tap into that cognitive toolbox that we talked about very much, right?

These are these are birds that are acting a little bit more on instinct and that is evident in their behavior and we kind of took that and over generalized it to be representative of all birds. Another reason for that is that their brains are really different than ours and for a long time Western scientists had this vision of this kind of linear progression of the brain that starts with the very rudimentary small smooth brains of things like amphibians and then kind of had this linear progression to the really big,

weakly brains of ourselves and the other mammals. And birds have small smooth brains like a reptile and so we kind of misunderstood and that they're organized in a little different way and so we kind of took that to mean that their brains just must not have the same kind of mental processing ability that ours do. Now we understand it to be more analogous to within the more comparing like corvids and parrots to primates not all birds necessarily but at least with those kind of two big groups. Now we understand it to be more analogous to like a PC and a Mac right they're both computers they do pretty much the same stuff but the operating systems the way that they're like put together are definitely different.

They are patently different. Well I was thinking of a gas car versus electric car same idea they're both cars but they're run differently. Yeah exactly yeah that's that's another really great analogy and so and it just took us a while to catch up and catch on to that idea. But we have now and there's been a lot of you know over the past you know many decades kind of at this point. There's been a lot of focused attention to trying to understand cognition in these animals because it does present a really interesting question of like why.

Why do why are people smart why are chimpanzees smart what dolphin smart why are crow smart what sort of leads to that and.

But but there is this kind of interesting question of like what is it that those groups all have in common with each other that is the recipe for this kind of more advanced cognitive ability and that that was kind of the big picture thing that I.

“I came in to being really interested in when I started looking at these birds.”

And we're still kind of exploring you know we still haven't gotten just a nice clean answer to that question but it has definitely prompted us.

To understand the cognitive abilities of these birds in ways that we scarcely kind of imagined before. And so that leads to a lot of studies and headlines and articles that I think that increasingly the average person even people who don't care about birds or crow specifically end up kind of seeing because they you know just get pass around on Facebook or they kind of.

“You know get you see the headlines and the news newspaper whatever and so I think most and this might be a little naive but in my experience I think most people are familiar with this idea that they are very smart.”

Particularly when it's framed as like crow's being a smart as you know kids five year old eight year old kids that's kind that's a common headline I see and like national geographic and and some of these. And the thing that I want listeners to take away from that is and that I think that we have been kind of touching on throughout our talk so far is this idea that I want to affirm that that yes these birds are unique and impressive relative to most other birds and relative to most other animals.

But the caveat I want to add to that is that though those headlines are not generated off of the shared ubiquitous behaviors of all of the corvots collectively.

“They're often generated from something that one single species does so for example a really common question that I get asked is is it true that grows make tools and the answer is yes that is true.”

But the caveat is there's only one species that does that in the wild one crow species or one species one crow species one crow species. Now there's evidence that rucks will make tools and captivity there's also evidence that the Hawaiian crow the alala will make tools unfortunately they're only option is to make them in captivity because they're extinct in the wild they probably did it in the wild but we didn't have a chance to observe that before we cause their extinction. But so new cow adonian crows are the only species that actually produce hook or tools type of one of the types of tools that they produce is a hook and they're the only ones that do that in the wild and so while I want people to be very excited about these birds and in general sort of you know thinking about them is these like really poorly smart animals.

I also want to caution people against assuming that the sort of amazing feats of intelligence that they read about or see are something that their backyard corvots are also doing because that may or may not be the case depending on the types of corvots that live in your backyard.

Well one of the things I read too when I was in my homework was that they're brain to body ratio is as much larger than other birds is that saying it right.

Yeah yeah so that was one of the kind of classic mistakes that I didn't touch on earlier which is this idea we were a little too obsessed with absolute size right. The crow brain is about the size of a walnut that's not very big but like you're saying what what actually counts is not it's total size but it's size relative to the rest of its body. Right which is why a blue whale which has a humongous brain and is you know can do some impressive things. It's brain to body ratio though despite how big its brain is is smaller than our brain to body ratio or a cross.

And so here's a theory I have so I'm using them wrong in my theory so this is the same thing so I was when I was doing the homework the way I understood it the way I read it again maybe I have got a much very smaller crow brain than most is that the way you really the way you approach it the traditional way.

But you got an environment and you really observe and you watch how the interact and do all the different things my correct on that part is that how your main study is.

“Yeah so you're right but I think it it offers an opportunity to talk about the differences there.”

A lot of the cognitive work is done in a more lab controlled. Yeah and so the the reason that we might have those different approaches is.

So we could just dive into to the work that I did so people kind of know what we're referencing but so I spent my PhD studying crow funerals.

And what I mean by that is when a crow dies and that dead body is observed by another crow most often what happens is that crow will produce an alarm call. And they will that results in the attraction of other crows to the area they'll form this big group they'll be flying around making a lot of noise sitting in the tree tops. Clearly you know observing this body and then after about 20 minutes or so they'll they'll kind of slowly start to disperse. So that's the the most basic blueprint of what a crow funeral looks like.

“So to understand certain components of that behavior it's really essential that we are monitoring it in the wild.”

But I can see really genuine responses I'm still manipulating it and so for example one of the studies I did is okay well if they're they're having this reaction.

In some ways it looks like the same reaction they have towards a predator where they are alarm calling they are gathering together right so. If I want to know like what are the differences I need to produce this reaction towards a dead crow towards a predator and then towards a non a dead non crow so that I can compare all of these different responses and see like is it the same thing across all of these things are is it more intense here or are the localizations different whatever it is. But for other things it would be a little too hard to produce the thing that you want to test so for example like a really classic cognitive test is the string pull test where you tie a string to a branch and at the end of that string hanging down from the branch is like a piece of food that the bird wants.

“So those arrangements are not good at puff they're not hovering birds and so they they have a really hard time just kind of like on the fly like grabbing it.”

So the better strategy is to purchase on top of the branch and pull the string up where you pull tuck the slack under your foot. Pull tuck the new slack under your foot right we can sort of imagine that that is a really great sort of causal reasoning test. But that's a hard thing to ask a wild bird to you know you could spend many many hours sort of hoping that one would come by but it's hard so whether we're in a lab setting or while setting really depends on the type of question that we're asking.

And for me as a field biologist I sort of have tailored my career towards making sure that the questions I was asking are ones that let me be outside in the environment. But other people they're that's not how they like to do their science they like to do the lab based science and they we need both groups. But that that's kind of what drives those different methods of study. So we're right. Again, my corroborating anyway so when I really envisioned when I was kind of digging into this thing I was thinking about you.

And it was thinking about you being outside and also the comparison of the the crows or the corvids to the primates right where we just assumed the primates were so much smarter when maybe they're not as smart. They're just as smart but maybe there are other things that just as smart as well. So I really was kind of liking you to the Jane good alls and the Diane Fossi people throughout the field and really paying attention and that's kind of where I really came to us and she's kind of like that really is what she's really.

Which is kind of true. And that is kind of true that's a incredibly nice thing to say. So yeah, I'm your best friend now. My I would say that one big difference between my the work that I was doing in the work that they were doing is they were doing for my PhD. They were doing much more observational studies where they weren't really manipulate there were cases where they did but they kind of got their names were made on this kind of immersive.

Writing down everything that they were doing and then extract looking for patterns and extracting the sort of rhyme and reason to that from those those many many hours of completely sort of unadulterated observation and you know that. We have to we have to sort of take that with a little bit of a grain of salt because obviously we've all seen the pictures like they weren't on they were their presence was very known to the animals that they were watching and eventually there were like. You know interactions that do kind of change things a little bit but in general, you know that was like an observational study versus what I do so we can kind of put that on one end of the spectrum and then what I do is I'm in the wild watching wild animals but I am manipulating them where I am creating particular scenarios.

“That I'm trying to get them to respond to and I'm changing those scenarios and then on the far end is like when we have captive groups of animals where we then are controlling kind of everything.”

Or maybe we're having them interact in really unnatural ways like for example, there's some really cool studies that have looked at the birds, crows particularly carrying crows. Abilities to understand quantities counting.

That's just not something that you can do in the wild but if you can train a crow to interact with computer suddenly you can ask a lot of really interesting and a lot more sophisticated questions.

All of those things help us understand these animals but they are kind of different ways to approach approach the process. I'm going to give you more credit because I'm sure you worked actually manipulate but I'm sure you were observing as at different times too.

So I'm going to give you more credit to give yourself because I'm sure I'm paying attention to that.

Let's talk about let's talk about their facial recognition thing too and I read about this study and I'll get into it after. Because you don't remember people years later can you talk a little address that to I found that fascinating as well which really I'm now I'm a big crow guy now I'm going to call myself crow.

“Yeah that's how that's how that happens.”

So for a long time humans have understood that crow and ravens could remember our faces and we see evidence of this in you know the the field notes of very scientists and the sort of word to mouth story telling of people who made the mistake of having bad interactions with crow and getting harassed. And so kind of like the work that I did with the funerals I wasn't it wasn't my research that put it into the world that these birds have funerals lots of people understood that there's references to it in the Quran for example.

So like that wasn't know what was new is basically putting guardrails on asking questions about it so that we could tease out really discrete pieces of information.

“And so the facial recognition study the key thing there was yes it did sort of demonstrate and cement this again this long held understanding that many many types of people around the world had already come to know.”

Which is that crow's recognized your faces, but it did this in this really systematic way so that we could now we can really confidently say if you have a single bad interaction with a crow they remember you and really specifically the thing that they're remembering is your face. Now a lot of people who identify themselves as crow feeders who have crochet interact with everyday might say no it's not just your face I can I know because if I have my my mask on and my hood up they still see me and you're not wrong but the first thing that they learn is your face over time they add in those other details right.

So we learn we were able to sort of and I'm saying we I actually didn't participate in that study I'm sort of using the royal capital W we. But that was before my time at UW. Was this the cave man thing this is the cave man thing yeah so yeah so yeah so what they did is they would trap they would wear these really distinctive masks. Right the cave man mask and then they had a dick chaney mask and they would capture the crows yeah which was you know it's not a it's not a deadly experience for a crow but they don't like it they certainly don't like it and then you know they tack they capture them they put leg bands on them so that we can individually identify the crows and let them go and then the question was if they saw that person that had.

But nine but they don't love it.

“Yeah they're like you put something on me and that wasn't there before and I have certain amount of feelings about that.”

Right if they see that person again. Do they just are they just like oh yeah I don't know him I mean are they going to pull them right my carry and just I don't know them right or are they going to. Pay attention or are they going to treat them like a threat and so what they found was that they definitely recognize them and they were very upset when they saw them in the future and that had a really interesting side effect which is that.

wasn't just the banded crows that were upset non banded crows meaning girls had never.

“Yeah how to direct interaction with this person were also learning this information.”

So it was not only that the original sort of targeted individuals or pairs were learning these faces but that information was getting passed through the broader kind of crow community. Well and by the way guys listening what the way they did that too because we didn't really say it so they were mass to do this thing.

And the way they tested they put the mask back on when they were in the mass that's when they recognize them right exactly exactly.

And eventually they sort of increase because and I think it's a fair criticism some people said well you know caveman mask and one of those goofy Halloween dick chanies those are those don't really look like human faces like those are pretty weird things. And so ultimately they expanded the study out to use these really much more sinister in a lot of ways much more sinister looking masks because they were just molds of real people's faces that they turned into latex mask. So they had kind of a horrible like Freddy Krueger I don't know look like you just had some of these face off of wearing it.

Yeah but they were much less sort of caricatures yeah they looked like you know maybe a little bit off. But they look like people's faces and they found the same they found the same thing. I have one of two questions so you know what getting to the funerals and getting to this one of the things that because the misconception of funerals people thought there was like a human funeral which is really what they were doing is they were going there to learn maybe to protect themselves down the road. But one of the questions I have because I know they they reacted kindness if you feed them all the time they know who you are because you're feeding them and they kind of rewracked that.

Do they so when they do they have and I don't know if it's been studied or if there's there but do they they experience grief like when one dies do they have grief. That's a great question and not one that we know the answer to yet which I know you're going to have some listeners that go I know the answer. I just study as I'm done the study hasn't been done and it's it's a complicated question because I on the one hand right I think one of the most devastating things that Western science has ever done has been to perpetuate this idea of human exceptionalism.

Right again returning to this idea that evolution is somehow this linear process of which humans are the pinnacle of success.

“That's just not true in in many ways. From a scientific perspective of like how you define success is just simply not true. We defined it ourselves so we created that definition.”

Exactly exactly and kind of the same thing goes with with that where like a lot of the definitions we were putting around it were sort of designed to make it so that people were sort of. At the top of that of that pinnacle because we're the best and so I don't I don't lot listeners to misunderstand what I'm about to say as as me sort of buying into that idea. What I spend a lot of time thinking about is when we look at animals right what we can see the whole beauty of biodiversity and evolution is that everything kind of has their special thing.

They have some thing that that's like been there niche in their world their little place in the world that they're really good at that allows them to persist. And the way that collectively right the way that animals interact with their environment we really only understand our way and we can sort of through technology and stuff we can we can start to open the box of the other ways that are possible. But your average person the way that they interact with the world is their only understanding of what's possible to interact with the world but actually there's a huge.

But they get our getting so much information that's kind of their special thing and so when I think about emotional intelligence.

I do think that that has been kind of the human special thing. It's something that has been really important to our success as a species because our.

“The level of emotional intelligence that we have had I think has been a huge contributing factor to our ability as a species to thrive and live in community and do all of the things that when things are working well.”

Are the things that create that ability. But just like the dog that doesn't mean that other animals completely lack any emotional and tell it we can still smell we can't smell cancer.

But we can still smell and it's really important for us to be able to smell and when we look at these animals that have these really deep rich social connections. It makes evolutionary sense that there would be levels of emotional intelligence that would be part of that package because in social animals strong bonds are a strength they're an evolutionary strength.

To a limit though because if you're you know if you're an animal that is like a crow that plays the role of both predator and prey where more than you know there's a good chance that when you.

And so having a really strong and emotionally bonded connection could be a really important component of what makes that possible and what makes that successful. Their life expectancy there their risk of of dying of losing your mate is not zero and to be able to move on from that relatively quickly and find a new mate is also valuable. Because if your whole. If you if you are sort of stunted from being able to go through that process then you're not producing as many offspring which more thinking and a strictly natural selective context is kind of the name of the game and we see and I've seen that right there was my.

“And I think probably the best example is there was a really famous crow in Canada called canac who is kind of a local celebrity it was he had been.”

Are you familiar with connect mark why I've milled a term the Canadians are called yeah yeah Canadians are called connect so this was some of your listeners may who know who connect was. You're you're if you don't look them up but very very famous local crow in the Vancouver area had been rescued by a person and just was kind of a local celebrity because he was he was why he you know he lived in the wild but he would come and kind of hurt on your shoulder and hand feed and was very friendly and. And as generally is kind of the long term prognosis for birth like that eventually kind of prematurely disappeared unknown reasons.

And he was partnered at the time that that happened and his partner by the next breeding season had found a new mate and moved on right and it is to her advantage to be able to do that same when their kids die and their kids do you know about 50% of crow offspring die within their first year. So if they have to expand a great deal of emotional output and energy you know in this kind of deep grieving state that's not as as evolutionarily useful to them right so.

“But it's but it's a hard you know it's a hard question to put all of those together and so that's why I say like I don't.”

I spend a lot of time with crows it's really hard not to just be like of course I agree with you idiot like of course have you ever watched them like look how cute they are with each other yeah but when I sort of put all of the pieces in place it. It just rains me in a little bit and expands my thinking too well maybe the way that they're interacting with each other in the world is just different than what I'm thinking of as a possibility through the lens of my own human experience.

of behavior and ways of interacting with their environment and just ways of existing that are beyond our ability to conceptualize but that that shouldn't degrade that the value and respect that we give those creatures and their place in the world. So I agree you know one of the things I like to is because they have big they're real big family units and they're similar you know this comes back to you being the gen good all but they're. The juvenile stay with the family a lot longer because they're learning and observing in the in the world which is pretty wild and the even the the teenagers take care of the baby and are learning from that the similar to primates and dolphins and some of the other intelligent species that are out there.

“Which I think at some level again not to go along where you're saying you have to kind of take a step back and it's some level of correlates they're actually learning all the time and paying attention to things because I think it's just fascinating.”

Yeah there's definitely a correlation between cognition and sort of extended parental care which is the term that we would just use to describe what you're doing where instead of. That's better than what I say it I like that word. Where you think about a duckling right or we've been you have kept this kind of short window and then you Robin is like get out of here kid versus somber and ravens they don't they don't do the extended parental care they have that sure window yeah they I mean they have. They take care of their kids up until you know kind of the end of the breeding season but once they hit a certain age it's like get off the territory I don't want to see you again.

“So they do not do the cooperative breeding which is the term for what you were describing earlier where these that you have these kind of multi generational family units.”

So I do want to include that not all cooperative not all helpers so that's the term for the the sub adults that are not the primary pair.

They're not they're not always related sometimes they're unrelated birds yeah so sometimes those units are not comprised just of.

People within the family general multi generations within the family units that happens with their guns as well they do the same thing they have other mothers basically they're all kind of the women all hang out together and take care of all the babies together but there's other you know you have it you could have multiple mother. Yeah and that that's on and I'm sure you probably know more about that than me but what I know is that in in that example you have this kind of troop right. This matriarchal well it's not a matriarchal you have this troop system of yeah except for the the men's that come in and sort of but they are in some way they're like in some ways peripheral to the daily goings on of the social units which is mostly driven by the females like you're getting at but anyway I'm not a bad but an expert but it's a different just to say that that's a different framework.

Then what the Christ is there's right back to where you're saying we just have to understand and accept the fact that we don't fully understand it right at some level yeah there's lots of different ways to be social. And we'll be right back.

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Segued by the joint pain arthritis kidney and liver conditions and more. They'll experience faster recovery increased vitality and extended quality of life without the need for surgery or harmful drugs. That through the nuts on the ground so cars drive over sort of crap in that form which is really cool yeah and now tell me about the other one I want to know about is the one the pros that. Take bread and they throw it in the water to bake fish and then get a fish is that real. That so that's another good example of something I just it's real in the sense that I have seen videos of it.

“Yeah that don't appear to be doctored it's it is not a behavior that I think that we have studied kind of like the gift giving.”

It's not a behavior that we've studied systematically enough to kind of say like here's what they're doing.

They understand what this that's a great example of like do they understand what they're doing.

That's a good example of one of those really interesting behaviors that I don't know that we have scientifically sort of sussed out yet but that doesn't mean it's not it's not real because I mean you saw the videos I've seen the videos. Yeah it seems central but nuts we have studied so the nutcracking in Japan by the carrying grows that was something that there was a a studied on where they looked at what the term we use is the cultural transmission of that behavior because it started in a very particular place near this driving school.

“And we they were able to track the way that that behavior over time had radiated out.”

Clearly, grows were learning from each other about this new as far as I know is that paper came out in the 90s there hasn't been any work on that sense.

I don't know if that behavior has has maybe lost was culturally lost or maybe it's more even more prolific than. Then it used to be I'm not sure but I haven't really heard even though that something that often gets featured in a lot of like nature documentaries I from a research and perspective I don't know that there's been any new work on that since the 90s.

“So I picture the crow sitting next to me and say what's this you know having not so shiny my feathers are I've got all this protein in my body must be through this net dance see that see how shiny I'm looking you should try this isn't pretty.”

Tell me what your thoughts are this and I didn't even look at it on this thing I read about it a long time ago. I think it's in Sweden when they had the crows that were being rewarded for picking the cigarette butts up off the ground and there was some company because 40% of the dirty roads or whatever all cigarettes butts and they were bringing in and they were getting food by doing that.

What's your what do you know about what do you think about it so I call it butts for nuts.

And every three to five years there's a new start up that promises to do that there was there was one in France there's the Swedish one there was one there was the classic kind of crow vending machine Ted talk that some people know about by a gosh what's his name Joshua I think Joshua Klein kind of was on the same premise of that idea and. the problem with the butts for nuts will well short version of the story is none of these startups have ever worked and the most recent one which is the Swedish one went bankrupt a few years ago doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah there's a there's a couple of problems with this idea and none of them are that you can't train crows to do that that is not the problem the problem is that you can't scale it.

So you can train captive crows to do this right just like you can train a polar bear at the zoo to you know roll over for a reason yeah but you it's very hard to convince because the whole premise of these butts for nuts are you train a crow if you collect a cigarette butt and you put it in this machine will give you food right the problem is for wild crow. After a while or for just some individuals the question becomes why would I go searching for cigarettes if I could just search for food. You're sort of creating this middle step right that like is unnecessary that you know is unnecessary and so but they can they can do it they have the cognition for it the intelligence for it and and not that that is especially smart thing to do you can train a lot of animals to do an exchange task.

“But once you try and be like we're going to get an entire cities worth of crows doing this that just it just never works and the machines that you have to install to do it are expensive to maintain.”

So it just ends up being like why are we just paying human beings to keep litter off the streets or paying for educational PSAs that train teach people not to litter why are we paying to train crows so there's kind of that. But then there's this whole other premise of like do we want to be exploiting wildlife in this way. You know cigarette butts or we know that they're toxic is it harmful for crows that we that is kind of a complicated thing we're like it they are harmful but is it harmful enough within the lifespan of a crew to matter we also know that birds use successfully put cigarette butts in nest material to keep parasites down things like nest might so not to encourage people to just litter but like there's like a whole complicated thing there so.

What is that name some some like you know the whole mythical that they're your previous deaths and things like that or where do they come from do you have any idea.

I don't have a specific answer but in general sir the word we use for that is a colloquialism so most groups of animals have like a colloquial.

“I think it's really important to stress these are not scientific terms you'll never see these terms in a paper.”

I call them flocks of crows I call them herders of clothes of crows here's something for you the know that what a group of us know that what you're called I don't guess what they're isn't one because he never hang out with each other truthfully. I don't have a name of course of course good good yeah yeah no may I mean cats are of lions are kind of the one exception cats are generally very solitary creatures but yeah so those words people will be like this is the official name for a group of crows not okay it's it's maybe in the dictionary but official because it sounds cool.

yeah official we meet like it it it yeah it's not a scientific term and its origins likely do sort of heart and back to you know crows in the western world

have had kind of an up and down sort of reputation throughout time but particularly during you know periods of mass human mortality whether that was from violence or from disease those have become sort of sensitive sticking points for the Europeans because we don't like seeing our dead consumed by animals that's not something that's part of our sort of. Right after life process and so we tend to think poorly of animals that come to feast on our bodies and that is where a lot of those negative associations have their roots in now if you go to other parts of the world or that's either not a problem or is actually the point.

You don't see that same kind of yeah negativity towards the carrying eaters of the world yeah okay so what what what if we not talked about it you know with me I could talk for days what is there anything that.

“specifically we haven't covered that we should bring up that you think that people would be interested yeah I think probably the last thing I want to cover is a lot of people have this conception that because.”

The crows that live in their neighborhoods are common maybe even increasing a number that that is true of the global of the of crows in Ravens globally around the world and that's not true and in fact some of the species of crows and Ravens in the world represent some of the most endangered animals on the planet so I talked before about the Hawaiian crow.

the alala which is extinct in the wild they're doing some captive rearing and have a new release program on Maui.

But those crows have been functionally extinct meaning that they are no longer serving their ecosystem role because they're not in the wild for decades.

“the aga which is the mariana crow only lives on one island in the world rota which is in the northern mariana islands it used to also live on Guam but it was extrapated by the introduction of the brown tree snake extrapated means that.”

and organism has left in areas not completely extinct but it no longer lives in a big area that it used to well the brown snake was brought on to the island it wasn't even there originally and then they've taken over the island. Yeah exactly and so. I think that's important both because it's reflective of of this idea of biodiversity that we talked about earlier and I think that's important for people to remember that just because some species of crows and Ravens are urban adapters are animals that can exploit and do really well in the environments that we create.

not all of them are some of them are forest specialists that do really poorly when we cut down forests for human development and a lot of island species especially falling to that category and so. sometimes folks think like well if I like crows then I don't really have to worry about conservation but that's actually not true there are a number of species around the world that are you know in desperate need of conservation.

I said that the crows have grown 20% per decade for 40 years which must be a specific maybe it's American crow or something like that but that's some statistic I read and I said wow that's one of the rare things you hear but without knowing everything else you know again perceptions reality right.

yeah and another thing I'll add to that is that particularly on the east coast in the 90s crows were hit really hard by west now virus there was a massive dive.

in the aftermath of that dive there was then a pretty rapid expansion once the disease had kind of settled down still a major threat to crows and ravens but sometimes what people especially people who don't like crows will share our snapshots of population growth from that time period as kind of a tool to talk about how these birds are really out of control. they're taking over the world exactly but what they're sampling is this period of time after a really intense dive off where the population was rebounding so that's something to just kind of be.

“mindful of dates are very important when we talk about growth patterns so for every so I want to do the joke at the end but I wanted for people to find out more about you.”

your books whatever how they find you if they learn learn more where do they go point everybody in a cool cool places and let's get them to get to know.

they can't be with girls right now. Okay so the first place you can go is my blog corvid research dot blog.

I will admit that I've been incredibly to link with the past couple of years contributing new articles but as a starting point I have hundreds of articles really meant to introduce you to these birds and answer a lot of the most. some of the essential questions that people often have about them from there if you want a little bit slash your media you can check out my tiktok and instagram pages also at the corvid research handle I used to be on twitter not really any more. but but you can still find me instagram tiktok again that's become a little bit more of a repository although I have I made a new years resolution that I would make more videos soon but.

it's it's tough but those are great places to. to look for videos again if you just want to like really dive in and learn about a lot about these birds there's enough content there that I promise you'll be busy for a while.

“And for everybody's listening if you go to the description of the episode we're recording now but I'll have all that information in there too mark I did I actually if you want to switch I do actually have a joke.”

I've always wanted to have the guest to one but for you guys if you ever want to be on the show and you want your grandkids, nieces, nephews, whatever or if you want to be on the show if you send me an email at mcalfriopakas.com I promise you the guest and me would welcome you telling the joke versus us and I'm so glad you're telling the joke so let's hear it. So a few years ago I you know as a crow scientist I got this this call from a couple different fish and wildlife agencies in the Midwest were really concerned because they kept finding these dead close in the road and they didn't know what was going on and so I went down there and as you know I love to observe I love to observe the the crows and so I was I would wait by the road and what kind of how they were interacting with the with the street and the vehicles and stuff and.

Eventually I figured I could I could go back to the official wildlife agencies and I said well the answer actually was very simple which is that. Cros you know when they're watching the when they have birds down on the ground getting food and vehicles approaching they know how to say ca but they don't know how to say truck.

“Pretty good there you go that's that's the best one I have yours is way better in mind and I'm going to tell you off lines nobody has to hear.”

I trust me so first off, Kayla thanks so much to be on the show you know I'm fascinating I love what you're doing. I'm going to say go see hawks and you're up there but really thanks so much for being here so I really really appreciate it. It was my pleasure mark.

More mind for sure but and then for everybody else to soliciting is always say keep following.

You know like do all those things subscribe pass the word on. The more we grow the more opportunities I have to have guests like Kaylee on and she guys to make the show the guests are obviously the meal for the show but really it's really really important.

That includes this episode of for real with your host Mark Kyle for previous and future episodes of for real listen via all major podcast stream sites. (upbeat music)