Learning how to fly - army.mil

Wren: Welcome to Bird Brains — the show where "bird brain" is the highest compliment we know how to give. I'm Wren, ornithologist, crow enthusiast, and your guide to the most underestimated minds in the animal kingdom. Huge thanks to our sponsors today: Ada, who help businesses integrate A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts working across everything from A I to full SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses shaping the future of the silicon industry. We could not make this show without them. Now — today we've got a crow pulling off a trick straight out of an ancient fable, a study on corvid brainpower that the British public literally rallied to save, and a look at what science is revealing about crows and their relationship with us, their weird, occasionally useful human neighbors. Let's get into it. Wren: Okay, so — thread one. Corvid Cleverness. And I want to start with a story that most of us first heard as children, because it turns out Aesop was onto something real. You probably know "The Thirsty Crow." A crow finds a pitcher of water, can't reach the liquid because the level is too low, and so — rather than giving up — it drops pebbles in, one by one, until the water rises high enough to drink. It's a fable. A teaching story. Except here's the thing: it's also just… true. Researchers have actually tested this in controlled lab settings with New Caledonian crows and Eurasian rooks, and the birds do it. They drop objects into tubes of water to raise the level and retrieve a floating treat. And recently, a video went viral showing what appeared to be a crow doing exactly this in a real-world setting — not a lab, not a controlled experiment, just a bird on a street, working the problem out. Now, I always want to be careful with viral videos, because the internet loves a good crow story and not every clip is what it seems. But the behavior itself? Completely documented. What makes it so remarkable isn't just the action — it's what the action requires. The bird has to understand cause and effect. It has to predict that dropping something solid into liquid will change the liquid's level. That's not instinct. That's not trial and error in the simple sense. That is a model of the physical world running inside a brain the size of a walnut. Rooks in studies by Christopher Bird and Nathan Emery — yes, that is his real name, and yes, he studies birds, and yes, I am a little jealous — those rooks preferentially dropped large objects over small ones, and solid objects over hollow ones, because they'd worked out which would displace more water. They chose stones over cork. They understood density, at least functionally. And they did this after very little exposure to the setup. That's not slow learning. That's insight. That's a bird looking at a problem and reasoning through it. So the next time someone tells you a story is "just a fable," maybe ask them — have you checked whether the crow actually tried it? Wren: Thread two. How Their Minds Work. And this one starts with a funding crisis, because science is never just science — it's always also a story about what we as a society decide is worth knowing. A few years back, a major research program studying crow cognition at the University of Exeter was threatened with cuts. This was tied to the broader financial disruption following Brexit, which hit UK research budgets hard, particularly collaborative projects with European institutions. And the crow brainpower study — which was genuinely world-class work examining how corvids learn, plan, and reason — was in danger of ending early. So the researchers went public. They made an appeal. And the response was extraordinary. The public raised five hundred thousand pounds. Half a million. For crow research. I find that so moving, honestly. Because it tells you something about how people feel about these birds. There's a hunger to understand them. And what that research — and the broader field — is uncovering is that corvid brains are doing something extraordinary given their architecture. Birds don't have a neocortex. That's the layered outer structure of the mammalian brain that we tend to associate with higher thinking. For a long time, neuroscientists assumed that without a neocortex, you couldn't have complex cognition. Corvids have essentially proven that assumption wrong. What they have instead is a region called the pallium, and in crows and ravens it's extraordinarily dense with neurons — packed in ways that allow for the kind of flexible, associative thinking we see in great apes. A 2020 study published in Science found that crows showed something resembling subjective experience — that they appeared to have a form of sensory consciousness, responding to stimuli in ways that suggest they're not just processing input but actually aware of it. Now, I want to be careful here — consciousness is a word scientists use very cautiously, and rightly so. But the data is genuinely striking. These birds plan for the future. Western scrub jays — now called California scrub jays — will cache food differently depending on who was watching when they hid it. If another jay was nearby, they'll go back later and re-hide the food somewhere private. They're modeling the mental states of other birds. They know what the other bird saw. That's a theory of mind, or something very close to it. And the fact that half a million people reached into their pockets to fund that research? That tells me the world is starting to catch up to what these birds have known all along. Wren: Thread three. A Corvid and People Story. And this one is warm, I promise, because we spend a lot of time in this show talking about how clever crows are, but today I want to talk about how social they are — specifically, how attuned they are to us. There's a study from Phys.org that caught my eye recently, and it builds on a growing body of research suggesting that crows have essentially co-evolved with human civilization. The headline is almost funny in how direct it is: "Study reveals the crow's best friend — Humans." And look, I know that sounds like something a crow PR team would put out, but the science behind it is real. Crows — particularly American crows and carrion crows — have thrived in urban environments in ways that most wild animals haven't. And researchers are finding that this isn't just opportunism. It's a deep, behaviorally complex relationship. Urban crows learn the rhythms of human life. They know when garbage trucks come. They know which houses put out food scraps on which days. They recognize individual human faces — and this is extremely well documented — they remember whether a specific person was a threat or a friend, and they pass that information on to their offspring and to other members of their group. John Marzluff at the University of Washington did a now-famous series of experiments where researchers wore masks while trapping crows, and the crows — having been caught and banded — remembered those masked faces for years afterward. They'd scold the masked humans, dive-bomb them, and recruit other crows to do the same. The "dangerous" masks got passed down socially. Young crows who'd never been trapped would still mob the face they'd learned was a threat. That's culture. That's the transmission of learned information across generations. But here's the flip side, and it's the part that makes my heart a little full: crows also remember kindness. There are documented cases — genuinely documented, with photographs and ongoing records — of crows leaving gifts for people who regularly feed them. Shiny objects, buttons, a piece of glass, sometimes food they've found. Gabi Mann, a girl in Seattle, famously received a collection of small trinkets from crows she'd been feeding since childhood. A researcher friend of mine jokes that crows are the only wild animals that will leave you a Yelp review. And look, we don't know for certain what motivates the gift-giving — whether it's intentional reciprocity or something else — but the behavior is real, it's repeated, and it tracks with everything else we know about how these birds model social relationships. They are watching us. They are learning us. And in some cases, they are choosing us. That might be the most bird-brained compliment I've ever heard. Wren: So here's what I keep coming back to, at the end of an episode like this. Intelligence isn't a single ladder with humans at the top. It's more like a forest — different species finding different paths through the same problems of survival, memory, relationship, and meaning. Crows didn't evolve to impress us. They evolved to live, and somewhere along the way, they became astonishing. Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams who know a thing or two about building smart systems, and who make it possible for us to celebrate the ones nature already built. If this episode made you look twice at the next crow you pass on the street — good. Stay curious, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you know someone who needs their mind changed about birds, share this episode with them. All the studies and sources we talked about today are in the show notes. Go look them up. The crows would want you to.