Crows are Way Smarter than I Realized
Who knew crows are so much like us?
Hiya!
While chatting with a childhood friend, she told me her dad recently befriended a crow. She visited her parents over the holidays and said she’d often see her dad staring out into the yard. When she asked what he was doing, he’d say, “Oh, just saying hi to my crow friend.” My friend’s story warmed my heart and made me curious about crows. Especially since crows occupy nearly every tree around my home, and I’m pretty sure they think our yard is theirs since they often caw when I trespass.
Crows have a stigma of death attached to them thanks to their ominous caws and complete black coloring, which admittedly, may have influenced my assumptions. However, pushing beyond superstition, science shows that crows are extremely intelligent, even more than I realized. So, maybe, the crows around me aren’t yelling at me—perhaps, they’re just saying hi.
Well-Known Facts About Crows
Crows belong to a family of birds called Corvid (Corvidae), which also include ravens, jays, and magpies. The birds in the corvid family are known for their intelligence and for living in a wide variety of habitats, including urban cities, woodlands, deserts, moorlands, sea cliffs, mountains, and tundras. As a result, they’re found on every continent except for Antarctica. However, crows and ravens far surpass the rest when it comes to intelligence, social dynamics, and diversity.
No doubt you’ve been advised to never be mean to crows because they remember faces, can hold grudges, and will plot revenge. Well, guess what. It’s all true. Also, like my friend’s dad, many people have developed relationships with crows. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) wrote an article all about it, and apparently, forming relationships with crows is quite the trend on TikTok.
Even within their own species, the social dynamics of crows are complex and far more expansive than I can include here. But studies show crows are capable of social learning. According to the study, a crow can warn others of a specific predator, and those crows will tell others, and so on, for up to a mile in radius.
Think about that for a moment. The results of the study suggest, then, that crows can describe a specific predator to other crows. And the crows that haven’t seen the predator themselves, can understand this description, watch out for the predator using the description, and pass the information along to other crows. I mean, that’s incredible!
Crows are also well known for their creative tool use, including dropping nuts to crack them. Some research even found that “crows adjusted the height from which they dropped nuts in ways that decreased the likelihood of kleptoparasitism [other animals stealing it] and increased the energy obtained from each nut,” which basically means that on some level, crows understand physics.
They also make their own tools. I’m not just talking about finding something useful nearby, either. Crows can use “mental templates” to construct simple tools. Researchers discovered that crows aren’t mimicking tool-making behavior. They’re copying the design of tools and building upon that knowledge for the future. This suggests that crows could have an accumulative “tool-making culture” similar to ours in that they appear to pass down and build upon information.
So if crows are intelligent, and have such dynamic social abilities, then… are they self-aware, too? Well, according to a 2020 study, they sure are! The study’s researchers suggest that crows ponder their own minds and thoughts. More specifically, they found that crows can think about their thoughts while they work out problems.
The Brain of a Crow
Researchers understandably want to understand why crows have such unique intelligence, and the most obvious place to look is the brain. Sure enough, a crow’s brain is about the size of a human thumb or about 2 percent of its body mass— which is huge for its body size. However, the large brain mass is common in higher-intelligent animals such as Great Apes, dolphins, and ourselves. But the arrangement of their brains is also intriguing.
To begin with, crows have about 1.5 billion neurons which is about the same as some monkey species. The neurons are also densely packed, making communication between the neurons better. As a result, experts think the intelligence of crows is similar to Great Apes like gorillas.
In addition to their neurons, crows and ravens have unusually large forebrains, but they lack the neocortex mammals have, which is thought to be responsible for higher intelligence. However, researchers found they do have “connectivity patterns … reminiscent of the neocortex,” which could explain their brilliance and impressive social dynamics.
Beyond the neural makeup, there’s another similarity crows, and really all Corvids, share with Humans that might help explain their advanced brain development — and it’s something Millennials are often criticized for. Taking longer than usual to leave the nest. Researchers discovered that birds in the corvid family spend more time in the nest before leaving, more of their life living among family, and more days feeding their offspring than other birds.
Perspective Shift
When we think of intelligent life, we often think of aliens. But as science progresses and technology advances, we’re discovering intelligent life beyond ourselves — right here on Earth. However, many of these smarty-pants animals aren’t exactly accessible or easy to study. It’s not like we can go out and form a bond with an elephant, dolphin, or monkey while living in a city. Well, unless maybe they’re common where you live.
But crows are everywhere, all across the world, and have already begun integrating themselves into our artificial environments to be closer to us. Not to mention they are a lot like us. Or, as Dr. Jeroen Smaers, the co-author of a recent study linking the evolution of crow’s brains to the Tyrannosaurs dinosaur, says: “crows are the hominins of the bird kingdom.”
So why not meet them halfway, or at the very least, respect them? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m tempted to befriend the crows living in the trees around me right now.
Just as a reminder, you’re currently reading my free newsletter Curious Adventure. If you’re itching for more, you’ll probably enjoy my other newsletter, Curious Life, which you’ve already received sneak peeks of on Monday mornings.
The subscription fee goes toward helping me pay my bills so I can continue doing what I love — following my curiosities and sharing what I learn with you.
You can find more of my writing on Medium. If you’re not a member but want to be, click here to sign up! Doing so allows you to read mine and thousands of other indie writers to your heart’s content.
Lastly, if you enjoy my work and want to show me support, you can donate to my Ko-fi page, where you can also commission me to investigate a curiosity of your own! Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.
