Gifts of the Crow

The next time you call someone a “birdbrain,” think again. Especially in the case of a member of the corvid family — the crow or raven, among others — the brain is something to marvel at. Dr. John Marzluff, professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington, uses extensive academic research and anecdotal evidence to reveal the uncanny intelligence of these birds. His examples include a crow fashioning a very specific kind of tool to access food, recognizing and remembering human faces, scolding and warning perceived enemies, and even understanding cause-and-effect relationships. This is a rare book that will have readers raising eyebrows and asking, “Who knew?” Gifts of the Crow (Free Press) arrives in bookstores in June. — Lance Elko, Editor

Preface

A blue-black crow perches regally on the cornice of a stone building on the University of Washington campus, where he is often found. Almost hourly, he delivers food to his mate and three fledglings, while also keeping watch for any threat to the nest. Suddenly he turns his head, caws softly, and glides away, landing on a lamppost directly above a blond woman. The woman, Lijana Holmes, smiles and calls him “Bela” as she offers him a breakfast of eggs and meat, which she prepares daily. Bela, in turn, presents his special gift — recognizing Lijana and participating in this routine with her. His gift to Lijana is more abstract than what he provides his bird family, but it is powerful nonetheless — it is the ephemeral and profound connection to nature that many people crave.

Bela gives a slightly different gift this morning to my team as we walk through the same campus. For Bela knows us, and we know him. Five and a half years ago we captured Bela and affixed light plastic rings to his legs for identification. So whenever he sees us, the old crow cocks his head, stares, takes flight and swoops low — right at us — screaming a harsh call that we immediately recognize as a bird scold. His family and neighbors hear the cry and join in, flying toward Bela to support his attack, and soon they, too, share his rage. The mobbing crows circle and scream above our heads just as they would do to a predator. Bela’s discriminating actions give us remarkable and invaluable information, proving that crows can recognize and remember human faces. We wonder when, or if, he will ever forget (or forgive) us.

The gifts of the crow are physical, metaphorical, and far-reaching. Some, like Bela, provide understanding and companionship. Others have delivered sparkling glass, plastic toys, and candy hearts to their human benefactors. Some have dropped from the sky and shocked strangers by saying, “Hello.” A raven, with its natural curiosity and conspicuous manner, can lead a hunter to game or alert a search party to the whereabouts of an injured person. A magpie or jay can brighten a cold day by pecking softly at a window to beg for its daily ration of food.

These birds are corvids, members of the avian family Corvidae, which includes nutcrackers, jays, ravens, magpies, and crows. We will consider many of the gifts with which corvids enrich the lives of people and the action of nature in the chapters ahead, and we will argue that a corvid’s ability to quickly and accurately infer causation is itself a natural gift. It has survival value. This and other demonstrations of its mental prowess are gifts that all birds — and most likely their dinosaur ancestors — gained through evolution.

Crows’ close association with humans has inspired art, language, legends, and myths. Corvids have their own form of eloquence as they exercise mischief, playfulness, and passion. They also lead us to reflect on their common behaviors with us and other sentient creatures and empower us with a deeper understanding of nature. People from all walks of life eagerly recount the antics of their former pet crows or enthusiastically tell us authors about the fascinating, sometimes troubling behaviors perpetrated by their local jays, magpies, and ravens. In this book we celebrate their accounts along with others we have found in the scientific and popular literature, because these rare and exceptional behaviors cannot be limited to the few specialized researchers who study corvids.

Some scientists are dismissive of citizens’ reports, viewing them as unreliable or unexplainable, because of laypeople’s lack of formal training, lack of documentation, overinterpretation, and uncontrolled influences. To be sure, we have encountered descriptions of events laden with hyperbole and seasoned with more imagination than fact, but we were compelled to investigate them nonetheless and to interview the people who made the observations in order to verify the events. Taken individually, such stories are anecdotal, but collectively they provide a unique body of information that stimulates scientific exploration and becomes an assemblage of possibilities.

We draw from this cross-cultural collection to offer many intriguing stories about corvids’ fascinating behaviors as we explore the anatomy and physiology of the bird brain. We have tested these anecdotes, such as those of the crow that summoned dogs or the ravens that windsurfed. Putting them through the scientific process, we evaluated each report for believability, precedence in the scientific and cultural literature, and the mental ability a bird would need to act in such a manner. We came to know the bird and the citizen scientist behind the observation as we examined as completely as possible what causes people and birds to share such poignant moments.

We recognize the intelligence and adaptability of this unique group of birds and base every thesis about their humanlike behaviors on how the brain of a bird is known to function. Through brain-scanning technology, which allows us to see within the crow’s gray matter, we first glimpse how a crow’s brain works through a problem. To date, most of the understanding of the inner working of the crow brain was derived from what was known from a few mammals and detailed investigations of song-learning in birds. We hope you will find, as we have, that understanding some of the neurobiological processes of crows adds mightily to your appreciation of how these remarkable creatures operate so successfully in our dynamic world.

Chapter 1: Amazing Feats and Deep Connections

Betty, a New Caledonian crow, peers briefly into a tall, clear vertical tube at the small basket of food inside it and pecks quickly at the plastic to test if she can break through it. Her brain is lit with electrical and chemical energy as she contemplates the puzzle of reaching the treats. Drawing on her experience in the wild using stems and branches, she grasps in her beak one end of a straight length of wire that researchers have left nearby and plunges the business end down into the tube in an unsuccessful attempt to spear the food. When that doesn’t work, she tries to edge the food up and out by pressing the wire against the walls of the tube. After that doesn’t work, Betty next fiddles with her wire and bends it, turning it from a spear into a nicely serviceable hook. With this manufactured tool in her beak, she deftly fishes the handle of the basket and lifts the prize from the cylinder just as a person might heft a bucket full of water from the bottom of a well.

Betty’s fabrication of her fishing tool would easily best the efforts of other creatures that are widely considered to be her mental superiors. A dog, even a pooch of the cleverest breed, would likely paw the tube, shake it, chew at the top, and dig at the base and yet most likely fail to get any reward for its efforts. A human toddler also might rap on the container or try to muscle it over and eventually cry in frustration or pound the carpet with hands and feet. A concerned parent or older sibling might respond to the toddler’s tantrum, reinforcing the child’s inadvertent use of his social power and connections to acquire the prize and also perhaps reinforcing a learned helplessness or dependency. For this particular test, the crow was smarter than a dog or human toddler. But if we measured the ability of dogs, crows, and toddlers to learn voice commands, the dog would rule the day. Demonstrating mental prowess or the intelligence of a species requires a wide range of tests and knowledge of the animals’ ecology and physical ability. Dogs may fetch newspapers and retrieve ducks for hunters, but without opposable thumbs they can’t hold wire tools. Wild New Caledonian crows, on the other hand, regularly use their beaks to fashion hook tools from plant materials. This ingenuity — crafting a hook from a foreign material and using it to gain an unreachable reward in a new setting — requires thinking, appraisal, and planning, mental attributes that have rarely been associated with birds, until recently.

Most people consider birds to be instinctual automatons acting out behaviors long ago scripted in their genes, but Gifts of the Crow celebrates the fact that some birds — particularly those in the corvid family, which we generally call “crows” — are anything but mindless or robotic. These animals are exceptionally smart. Not only do they make tools, but they understand cause and effect. They use their wisdom to infer, discriminate, test, learn, remember, foresee, mourn, warn of impending doom, recognize people, seek revenge, lure or stampede other birds to their death, quaff coffee and beer, turn on lights to stay warm or expose danger, speak, steal, deceive, gift, windsurf, play with cats, and team up to satisfy their appetite for diverse foods, whether Cheez Whiz from a can or a meal of dead seal. You can think of these birds as having mental tool kits on a par with our closest relatives, the monkeys and apes. Like humans, they possess complex cognitive abilities. In fact, they have been called “feathered apes.” 

Some of the crow’s achievements we discuss are well documented by credible observers. Most are plausible, albeit astonishing. And because these birds often live near people — in our gardens, parks, and cities — they often involve humans in their daring, calculated, emotional, and bizarre activities. Keenly aware of our habits and peculiarities, they quickly learn to recognize and approach those who care for or feed them and to avoid and even scold people who threaten or harm them. This important skill was learned and honed over millennia and enables crows to exploit friendly people and other animals and avoid the dangerous.

These birds are noteworthy in their ability to thrive in the midst of environmental challenges that discourage and even extinguish other species. The few exceptions are species that are isolated on islands: the Hawaiian crow and the Mariana crow, for instance, which are among the most endangered species on our planet. Other island crows, the majority of which are specialized members of diverse tropical-forest ecosystems, have also become rare; the Banggai crow of Indonesia, for instance, was even thought extinct until glimpsed in 2007 on small Peleng Island by intrepid local biologists.The success of most crows has a lot to do with their flexible and complex social lifestyles, long life spans, and large brains, which are able to integrate and shape what they sense into reasoned action. In fact, corvids and our own species share qualities, which have enabled both of us to adapt to changing environments and to flourish.

The sophisticated behavior of crows overturns any lingering notions of a “birdbrain” as being unintelligent. Biologists have documented and explored corvids’ language, delinquency, insight, frolic, passion, wrath, risk taking, and awareness. In Gifts of the Crow, we explore each of these topics to learn how crows’ individual and collective social learning abilities enable them to craft tools, communicate subtle messages, plan for the future, intuit solutions, deceive others, and carefully adjust their boisterous lives to our unpredictable human nature.

Science is far from understanding the ways our own brains, let alone a bird’s, produce complicated behaviors. But in the last two decades, our understanding of how a bird’s cerebral equipment is organized, and how bits and pieces of it function, has made enormous strides. Now, we gain new insights every day.

The complexity of a bird’s brain becomes evident when we examine its many parts, which we do throughout Gifts of the Crow, in Tony’s original illustrations. Even phrenologists from the nineteenth century were enamored with the bumps and dents in the crow skull to which they attributed centers for caution, destructiveness, musicality, and imitation. The crow’s brain is indeed packed with ability, but our modern scientific view looks deep within the brain. There, relays from the eyes, ears, mouth, and skin transport their view of the world to the brain stem and into the brain, which uses emotion to integrate and shape diverse information and past experience to guide the crow’s behavior and enhance its survival and reproduction. Its brain allows the bird to learn quickly, to accurately associate rewards and dangers with environmental cues, and to then combine what it knows with what it senses and to draw conclusions leading to a more informed response.

In exploring the neurobiology of crows, we tell a lot of stories that show that humans and crows have an ongoing connection, a cultural coevolution, that has shaped both our species for millions of years. Archaeological evidence reveals that our earliest human ancestors shared the company of ravens and crows. Early hunter-gatherers noticed these birds and celebrated them in legends and myths around the world over thousands of years. Ancient spiritual connections are evident on the cave walls of Lascaux, France, where a crow-headed man has been interpreted as the soul of a fallen hunter. The writings of early Scandinavians celebrated ravens as useful informants. The First People of the Pacific Northwest saw them as creators and motivational forces, while in the oral histories of Eskimos, the abilities of ravens to prevail in lean times led these people to tie a raven’s foot around the neck of each newborn child to assure the survival of the next generation.

The Haida people of the Pacific Northwest placed their deceased shamans on elevated altars adorned with carved ravens, which symbolized the priests’ connection with the creator; there their bodies would be eaten by ravens, which would free their spirits and allow them to travel. In Tibet in a similar tradition, dead loved ones’ bodies were cut up and placed on tower platforms where revered ravens and vultures could eat them.

Throughout the world the mysterious, ingenious, and sometimes horrifying ways of crows and ravens have dramatically influenced our language, music, art, religion, and popular culture. A melancholy Edgar Allan Poe was moved to poetic fame by a talking raven.

Corvids’ mysterious dark form appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds and Vincent van Gogh’s final painting (Wheatfield with Crows, 1890). And of course contemporary film continues to employ the crow as a metaphor for the unknown.

Copyright © 2012 by John Marzluff, Ph.D. and Tony Angell. From the forthcoming book Gifts of the Crow by John Marzluff and Tony Angell to be published by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.