Training Crows
What I watched: A thought experiment on the intelligence of crows by Joshua Klein at TED2008. March 2008.
This post is going to be quite short and veers off my usual path. I have a meatier one coming your way soon.
After watching the video, I didn’t have a whole lot of epiphanies or insights about crows, but I wanted to write this post anyway. I stumbled on this video because I regularly check the Good News Network for uplifting stories. I find these stories counteract so much of the negative and dire news that crosses our eyeballs daily.
Scrolling through the various stories on the page I saw an article about a TED Talk discussing crows. I don’t know why I decided to watch it. Crows have never particularly fascinated me. I never really thought much about them at all before. I now have greater respect for them.
Klein offers a perspective on crows that’s not often suggested. Crows are typically lumped together with rats and cockroaches as nothing more than pests to be dealt with, including outright eradication. Klein tilts the lens a bit so we see them differently.
Maybe crows have received their bad rap in part because their vocalizations aren’t sounds of beauty as we’ve come to expect from so many other birds. Were they to not utter their loud, harsh caws and instead bless us with melodious singing tones, they might be a more welcome sight.
I lived in New York City years ago which gave me a firsthand view of the heartiness of cockroaches. They have adapted to being around humans and urban environments in much the same way crows have it turns out. Cockroaches and crows are synanthropic species, species that benefit from hanging around humans and the habitats we create such as dense urban cities.
The gist of the video’s message is that crows are intelligent and adaptive. Humans should figure out how to cohabitate with crows, perhaps training them to do something useful, rather than killing them. Sounds good to me. I’ve never been a big fan of killing animals unnecessarily.
Then I remembered reading somewhere that crows have indeed been trained to do something useful. A theme park in France leveraged the intelligence of crows, well rooks specifically (part of a family of birds called corvids that includes crows, rooks, ravens, and magpies) by training a team of them to collect discarded trash. After raising a few rooks in captivity, staff at the park taught them “to pick up pieces of garbage and place them inside a box that releases a treat each time rubbish is deposited.”
I loved that story. It felt right to respect the animals for their intelligence rather than discount them as nothing more than skyborne vermin. Innovation is always interesting to me, and this was a truly innovative solution to a problem – picking up trash. This felt like the proverbial win/win situation.
Here’s a video of the birds picking up trash at the theme park in France.
Oh, and if you run across a crow you would like to befriend, it turns out someone’s detailed a step-by-step process to do just that.
If I become friends with a crow someday, I think I’ll call him George. Why George? After watching this classic scene in a Bugs Bunny cartoon as a young child, George just seemed like the right name to call all animals.
But I’m digressing to rabbits (and ducks) and this is about crows.
Should you like to learn more about crows, check out 12 Fascinating Facts About Crows. And should you not want to learn more about crows, thank you for indulging me by reading this post.