UW professor learns crows don’t forget a face - The Seattle Times

Wren: Welcome to Bird Brains — the podcast that takes the biggest insult you can hurl at someone and turns it into the highest possible compliment. I'm Wren, ornithologist, crow enthusiast, and your guide through the surprisingly rich inner lives of corvids — that's crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Before we dive in, a huge thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — that's Ahh-Go — your go-to for silicon development consulting from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We're in good company today, folks. And speaking of good company — on today's episode, we've got crows that never forget a face, ravens thriving in one of the harshest places on Earth, and a classic fable that turns out to be… not so fictional after all. Let's get into it. Wren: Okay, thread one — Corvid Cleverness — and I want to start with something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks when I first came across it. You know Aesop's fable? The crow and the pitcher? A thirsty crow finds a pitcher with just a little water at the bottom — too deep to reach — and one by one, the crow drops stones into the pitcher until the water level rises high enough to drink. It's a lovely little story. Ancient Greek parable about ingenuity. And for a long time, people assumed that's all it was — a story. A metaphor. Something humans invented to explain cleverness in a charming way. But here's the thing. Researchers actually tested it. They presented New Caledonian crows — already famous for being among the most tool-savvy birds on the planet — with a similar setup. A tube of water, a floating treat just out of reach, and a pile of objects nearby. And those crows? They dropped in the heavy objects. They figured out that stones sink and therefore raise the water level, and they chose stones over hollow objects, and they chose wide tubes over narrow ones. They weren't just randomly experimenting. They showed what researchers describe as causal understanding — a grasp of why something works, not just that it works. And that distinction is enormous. A lot of animals can learn by trial and error. Far fewer can reason about cause and effect. Now, New Caledonian crows have a bit of a celebrity reputation in corvid research circles. They're the ones from the island of New Caledonia in the South Pacific who craft tools from leaves and sticks — bending, shaping, trimming them — to fish grubs out of tight spots in wood. But the pitcher task isn't about pre-learned tool use. It's about spontaneous reasoning applied to a novel problem. Which is, frankly, the kind of thing that makes neuroscientists sit up very straight. And it makes me feel a lot of feelings about the word "birdbrain," none of them involving embarrassment on the bird's behalf. Wren: Thread two — How Their Minds Work — and this is where things get a little spooky, in the best way possible. Let's talk about faces. Specifically, let's talk about the fact that crows remember yours. Not vaguely, not the way you might dimly recognize someone from a party three years ago. We're talking sharp, specific, long-term, cross-generational facial recognition. There's a now-famous set of studies out of the University of Washington — and if you've ever heard the name John Marzluff, this is his work — where researchers wore particular masks while trapping and banding crows on campus. Perfectly standard field research, but obviously not a fun experience for the birds. And then those same masked researchers walked around campus again — not trapping anything, just walking — and the crows mobbed them. Dive-bombing, scolding, raising an alarm. But here's what really gets me: the crows hadn't just remembered the face themselves. They'd told their friends. Birds who had never been trapped, who had never personally encountered the masked researcher, were also mobbing. The social information had spread. The grudge had been shared. And over the years of that study, the number of crows responding to the dangerous mask actually grew, even as the population turned over, even as new generations of crows who had never experienced any trapping at all joined the mob. The knowledge passed down. Now sit with that for a second. A crow can look at a human face — which, from a bird's-eye view, is genuinely not a natural object to distinguish — identify it as a specific individual, associate that individual with a specific past event, and then communicate that social information to other crows, including its own offspring. That's not instinct. Instinct is "avoid large shadows, they might be hawks." This is something else entirely. This is what researchers call episodic-like memory — the ability to remember not just what happened, but who did it, and to carry that memory forward in meaningful ways. And what's underneath all of this? A brain structure called the pallium — specifically a region called the nidopallium caudolaterale — which functions in corvids a lot like the prefrontal cortex does in mammals. The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain responsible for planning, decision-making, and social cognition. In humans and other primates, it's enormous relative to brain size. Corvids have independently evolved a functionally equivalent structure. Different architecture, same remarkable output. Intelligence, it turns out, is not one thing that evolution stumbled upon once. It's a solution that life keeps finding. Wren: And then there are the ravens of the Dead Sea, which is a story I find deeply charming for reasons I'll explain. The Dead Sea — for those of you who haven't been — is one of the harshest environments on the planet. The water is so salty almost nothing survives in it. The surrounding desert is scorching and sparse. It's the kind of place where "thriving" is not a word most animals get to use. And yet. Ravens are there. Boldly, confidently, absolutely there. Because here's the thing about corvids and harsh environments — corvids are, almost without exception, extraordinarily good at finding resources where other animals can't, at reading human activity as an opportunity, and at being, frankly, opportunistic in the most admiring sense of the word. Around the Dead Sea, ravens have figured out the rhythms of tourists, the timing of waste disposal, the geography of the settlements. They've adapted not just to the desert heat but to the social landscape of a place full of humans. And this tracks with what we know about corvid cognition more broadly — their intelligence isn't just theoretical, it's profoundly practical. Urban and semi-urban corvids around the world have developed behaviors that are specific to their local human environment. Crows in Japan famously learned to place walnuts at pedestrian crossings, wait for cars to crack them, and then collect the meat when the light turned red — safely, efficiently, brilliantly. Crows in cities near fishing areas have learned to mimic the behavior of fishing lines being tugged to steal bait. Each of these isn't just clever — it's locally adapted clever. It's culture. Real, transmitted, behavioral culture. Which is thread three — the Corvid-and-People story — and honestly, the Dead Sea ravens are a perfect bridge into this because the relationship between corvids and humans is ancient and it runs deep. Crows and ravens have been following human settlements for thousands of years. We generate food waste, we create disturbance that flushes up prey, we leave things lying around. But the relationship isn't just parasitic — it's genuinely reciprocal in interesting ways. There are well-documented cases of crows bringing gifts to humans who have fed them. A girl in Seattle named Gabi Mann spent years feeding crows near her home, and they started leaving things for her: buttons, pieces of glass, small shiny objects, once a tiny piece of metal with the word "best" on it. Her family kept a labeled collection of everything the crows brought. Now, researchers are careful about the word "gift" — because we want to be precise about what we can and can't claim about intention — but the behavior of object exchange in return for food is real and documented, and it speaks to something fascinating about how corvids navigate social relationships with other species. They track individual humans. They notice who feeds them and who bothers them. They adjust. And they teach their young to do the same. Which brings us back, really, to that grudge study. Because the flip side of remembering an enemy is remembering a friend. The same cognitive machinery that makes a crow scold a masked trapper for years makes a crow return to the yard of someone who feeds it, recognize that person specifically, and over time develop what looks — behaviorally, at least — like a relationship. Ravens that live in close proximity to humans, like those Dead Sea birds, show reduced fear responses, increased boldness, and what ethologists call neophilia — a love of novelty — which in ravens often expresses as fearless investigation of new objects and situations. In a bleak salt desert, that fearlessness is probably what keeps them alive. Wren: So here we are, at the end of another episode, and I'm sitting with the same feeling I get every time I dig into this research — this quiet astonishment that intelligence is not a ladder with humans at the top. It's more like a tree, with branches going in directions we're only beginning to map. Corvids are on one of those branches, doing things with their hundred-thousand-neuron-packed little brains that we once assumed required a primate mind. And they've been doing it in our cities, on our campuses, in our deserts, for thousands of years. Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode made you look twice at the crow on your fence post — good. Stay curious, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you loved this episode, share it with someone who still thinks "birdbrain" is an insult. Show notes have the links to all of today's stories, and I will see you — or rather, the crows will see you — next time.