Who's the smartest corvid?

I live next to a farm in a rural town. We have lots of cats around which are necessary to keep the rodents in check. Our cats love to play their prey to death in our yard (yeah nature is cruel). Some of the local crows know how to get the dead mice from the cats. One or two crows distract the cat, the cat likes to chase the crows for the thrill of the hunt, and then one crow swoops in and steals the cats prey. The cats are always bamboozled when this happens and we watch and laugh. Really smart these feathered freaks :D

I leave shelled peanuts and other bird feed out in the winter, and is fascinating to watch the crows and magpies to crack them open, feed on some of them, then grab two shelled peanuts and fly off with them. They already recognize me coming out in the winter mornings with the bird feed and peanut bags. They wait patiently in the surrounding trees until I'm in the house again. They even see me through the windows watching them and only come down to feed once I am out of sight for them. Truly remarkable.

We also have some pairs of red kites in our area which circle over our fields for prey. The crows don't like them and will try to chase them away, mostly in packs of two to three crows. They are 99% successful in chasing the red kites away because they are more agile in the air and can do more complex flight manouvers. But once one of the crows got to close to the claws of the kite and was killed instantly and dropped down dead. What happened then was even more fascinating. The whole flock of crows gathered around their dead companion and maybe "mourned"? I don't know how to else explain it.

Next winter I will try to befriend them even more, they are so fascinating!

One of the craziest behaviors I have seen was from a murder of American crows in a big city area sidewalk I walk down frequently - occasionally, I have observed homeless and vagrants throwing stuff at them, because sometimes they sleep under the powerlines where the crows like to perch and I think the crows defecate on them or something.

It's well known they can carry grudges, but one day, as I was walking down the sidewalk, a pretty sizable rock smacked the pavement next to me, seemingly out of nowhere. If it had hit my head I would have been hurt. I finally look up and see a big crow staring directly down at me - it had dropped it from the power lines, it had seemingly been intentional, maybe as a warning, I don't know. I attributed it to malice towards the vagrants that harass them.

I was amazed at how much intelligence it would take to 1) form a grudge 2) form intent to threaten/harm, 3) formulate a plan using a weapon with cause -> effect to execute intent, 4) wait for opportunity.

I have observed a lot of very intelligent behaviors from these birds but that was the wildest one. I have seen it happen once since, so I'm convinced it isn't an accident.

We have a rather large number of Blue Jays that frequent our backyard.

The smartest among them can weigh opportunity costs or count, or both.

Most of the jays will take two peanuts in the shell, go crack the shell open (sounds like they're cracking eggs in the trees, hilarious), cache the nuts (technically the seeds of the legume but anyway nuts from herein for brevity) and then take another unshelled one and fly away. Sometimes they crack open multiple shells and cache as many as they can before the final unshelled one.

The oldest of the jays, who is no longer alive, would regularly show up with so many cached nuts they could not take an unshelled nut. The cached nuts would get in the way.

They would occasionally drop a single peanut from their cache, because it meant they would be able to pick up an unshelled pair; that is they understood on some level the choice involved giving up some food because even more was contained in the shell.

Fascinating.

They, and one of their offspring who is still around, were the only jays that would do it. Though it's unclear if that's because they were "smarter" or simply because they trust us enough to take their time, whereas the other jays seem to act like they're stealing the nuts that belong to the two walking meat bags that live in the box and seem to leave their peanuts lying around.

Wonderful timing. Me and my daughter just started to feed and befriend a crow in our backyard. We started by putting out a few pieces of cat foot, shaking the plastic container and tapping on the table we put it on to signal to the crow we had put out food. Within only 2 days the crow has learned to come and swoop down for his meal within just a minute or two after he does his normal fly-by passes. Now only about 5 days in, and we have the crow coming right down to eat as we put out the food, not much of a care that we are there. My daughter wants to start training it to bring trinkets or coins so that is probably next on the agenda.

One thing I didn’t not really account for is that now in the morning when I step outside our new friend really lays on the noises of excitement as he knows a meal is about to be served.

My bet is on Ravens, who live a long time, and the ancients among them get a white flight feathers in the wings which I have seen once, up close in a nieghbors yard who was closer with the critters than humans. My fealing of ravens inteligence is based on there complex behaviors and one particular individual,who is bat shit insane, and makes the wildest strangest sounds and calls that are impossible to ignore for hours, but survives year to year, ie:dumb things never go crazy and or never survive there disfunctions. ravens also fly upside down regularly, and have been filmed pranking wolves by pulling there tails, and there is strong evidence for ravens working as spotters and leading wolves to easy/injured prey that the ravens get to clean up after the kill

If you like the idea of smart corvids, Adrian Tchaikovsky's scifi novel "The Children of Memory" is a fun read.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60850767-children-of-...

Australian Magpies are NOT corvid but Artamidae along with the butcherbird, but they are absolutely this intelligent.

They hold court over their juvelines and enforce behaviour, and they mourn the passing of members of the community.

I think it's possible the niche encourages large brains. A bit of nature not nurture maybe.

They are tool users. And they can teach offspring lessons learned from humans, and recognize friend and foe. Well mostly: cyclists are routinely mis-cast as foe no matter what. This is why Australian cyclists look like demented wheelie porcupines: cable ties on the helmet keep the eye-peckers at bay.

I feed crows during winter in my local park. They recognize me as soon as I enter and follow me around. Some even fly very close above my head and tap me with a wing.

Also they cache food they don't eat, they hide it, cover with leaves and make sure nobody is watching them, they act very casual. I am not sure if they remember the locations though.

Compared to ravens they have smaller head but I believe it is because they spend so much time near people (at least here in Europe you don't see ravens in cities, they are afraid,for historical reasons, of people and low in numbers) they get smarter and more crafty.

I can recommend a great book about corvids with beautiful illustrations: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300122558/in-the-company...

Chasing a bird of lesser intelligence so that it slams into an office building window seems especially cruel.

Thanks to Merlin Bird ID, I've got rather into birds in the past few years. We have a robin and blackbird that hang out in the garden with us, seemingly unafraid. A couple of months back I bought a camera feeder [0] but we've still only had three bird types that visit - a coal tit who comes fairly infrequently but moves so fast the camera could easily be missing him, some amazing jackdaws who seem to take turns on the feeder, and some Eurasian magpies who are absolute fucking arseholes. I made the mistake of putting a mealworm / seed mix in the feeder once, and the mealworms were so prized by the magpies that they worked out how to empty it completely within minutes of me filling it, throwing all the seed that they weren't interested in on the floor. I've stopped putting mealworms in it now, but now they empty it just to make sure there's none in there. I'm going to have to take it down and try to fashion some kind of grate to make it much harder to get the seeds out.

[0] https://naturespy.org - not the best resolution, but plenty good enough for up close video of the birds. I did a fair bit of research and loved the fact that these guys are a social enterprise who put their profits back into conservation projects. Highly recommended.

In my part of the world there's a cuckoo that pulls a heist on crows where the male makes annoying noises and the crows chase him off while the female cuckoo invades the nest and leaves an egg. When the egg hatches the bird inside looks nothing like a crow but the crow mama never catches on and pays child support until it's grown.

That cuckoo gets my vote for cleverest.

I've never seen any corvid use React, so they must be pretty smart indeed.

I really like crows and magpies. Crows especially do little hops when they run around and it always makes me smile. I've wanted to make friends with the ones around me for a while but I haven't yet

Well, TIL that I have previously learned c corone and c cornix backwards. Possibly because I associated the hood with corona somehow. Though that all comes from a time they were all just called corvus corone cornix here.

Here is one playing ball: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QqLU-o7N7Kw

This one is feeding a dog: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q7Z0yZhyz0s

Teasing an owl: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0i9tjnW7r0

Once as a kid I was at my cousin’s ranch outside of Waxahachie Texas. I was sitting on the steps to his house eating a sandwich when a crow landed about 10 feet away and hopped right up to me. I gave it some of my sandwich and it just flew off. It was very strange, it didn’t seem to fear me at all and just wanted a bite. I told my aunt and she was shocked and not aware of any tame crows at all.

> At least five such cases involved biologists: in Montana, Crow White ...

Crow White is a hell of a name. Bravo to their parents.

I still can't enter a corvid thread without looking for some Unidan copypasta.

I really recommend reading "Ravens in Winter" by Bernd Heinrich https://jake-reich.co.uk/blog/17

Did anyone else first read "the smartest COVID"?

Probably Grip?

Corvid-19 ?

Equipping cats and dogs with talking buttons (see, for example, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBh-BXgsO9IjhN-thTLvm... or https://www.youtube.com/@floundercat) has shown me there is a lot more going in their little heads than I suspected. There are examples of cats describing their dreams, or worrying about what will happen in the future, or theorizing about the nature of the world (in a very naive way).

Birds have higher neural density than mammals (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113) so can pack a lot into their tiny heads. I do wonder what they'd have to say, if given the chance.