Allies and Open Sources: Lessons from Northern Raven, the Largest OSINT Collection Operation in NATO’s History - Modern War Institute -

Wren: Welcome back to Bird Brains — the show where we take the greatest insult anyone's ever lobbed at an animal and turn it into the highest possible compliment. I'm Wren, ornithologist, crow enthusiast, and your guide to the surprisingly rich inner lives of corvids — that's crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Big thanks today to our sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio across the silicon industry. These are folks who think seriously about intelligence, which makes them a pretty natural fit for a show about the smartest animals most people walk right past. And today? Oh, we've got some good ones. We're talking ravens who remember your face — and your crimes — for years. We're talking crows in Cyprus turning heads with their problem-solving chops. And we're going to dig into what's actually happening inside that little skull to make all of this possible. Let's go. Wren: Okay, thread one — Corvid Cleverness. And I want to start with something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks when I first read about it. Crows in Cyprus — the hooded crow, specifically, Corvus cornix — have been getting a lot of attention lately, and honestly? They've earned it. Researchers and locals alike have been documenting these birds doing things that, if you saw them in a nature documentary, you'd assume some editing magic was involved. But no. These are wild birds, living alongside people, and they are figuring things out in real time. We're talking about crows dropping hard-shelled food items onto roads — timing it so that cars do the cracking for them. We're talking about birds that watch other crows, learn from them, and then improve on the technique. That's not instinct. That's observation, hypothesis, and iteration. That's basically the scientific method in a beak. Wren: And here's the thing about corvid problem-solving that I find so compelling — it's not just that they can solve problems. It's how they solve them. There's a famous type of experiment called the Aesop's Fable task, named after the old story where a crow drops stones into a pitcher to raise the water level and reach a fish. Researchers actually tested this. They put food floating in a tube of water and gave rooks — close corvid relatives — stones to use as tools. The birds figured it out. They selected stones by size, they chose stones over other objects that wouldn't work, and they did it without any prior training. What makes this jaw-dropping is that this was long considered a benchmark of physical reasoning — the kind of cause-and-effect understanding that marks higher cognition. And these birds nailed it. Wren: Now, when people rank the smartest birds in America — and several outlets have been doing exactly this lately — corvids dominate the conversation pretty much every time. American crows, Common Ravens, Blue Jays, Clark's Nutcrackers — these are the names that keep coming up, and for good reason. Clark's Nutcracker alone can cache up to thirty thousand pine seeds across a landscape spanning many square miles — and then recover most of them months later, in winter, under snow. Thirty thousand. I don't know about you, but I lose my keys about twice a week. These birds are operating at a level of spatial memory that researchers spent years trying to fully understand. And what's wild is that each of these species has developed their cleverness in response to their specific environment and social world. Corvid intelligence isn't one thing — it's a whole family of solutions to the problem of being alive. Wren: Thread two — How Their Minds Work. And for this one, I want to spend some time on something that I think is genuinely one of the most remarkable discoveries in animal cognition in the last few decades: the fact that ravens remember individual human faces, can identify strangers versus familiar people, and — here's where it gets personal — can hold a grudge for years. Wren: Now, the face recognition piece has been studied rigorously. John Marzluff and his colleagues at the University of Washington did a series of now-famous experiments where researchers wore specific masks while trapping and banding crows — a necessary but stressful procedure for the birds. Then, over the following weeks, months, and years, the researchers walked around campus in those masks. And the crows? They remembered. They would scold the "dangerous" masked faces, mob them, dive-bomb them — and they never forgot. Even crows that hadn't been trapped themselves learned to recognize the threat from others. The information spread through the flock socially. So you've got individual memory, social learning, and long-term retention all operating together. That's not a reflex. That is a cognitive system. Wren: Ravens take this even further into something that feels almost uncomfortably human. Multiple studies have documented that ravens don't just recognize individual faces — they track social relationships, they remember who wronged them, and they adjust their behavior accordingly over long periods of time. There's research showing ravens can remember specific individuals who cheated them in a food exchange — and they'll refuse to cooperate with that individual again, sometimes for years. Think about what that requires. It requires a sense of self in relation to others. It requires memory that's not just spatial but social. It requires something like a concept of fairness — or at least, of expectation and betrayal. Wren: And this is where the brain science gets really interesting, because for a long time, the assumption in neuroscience was that sophisticated cognition required a big, wrinkled neocortex — the outer layer of the mammalian brain that expanded so dramatically in primates. Birds don't have a neocortex. So for decades, people assumed birds were operating on a kind of autopilot, running on instinct and rote learning. And then researchers started actually looking at corvid brains — and found something stunning. The region of a crow or raven brain that handles complex cognition, called the nidopallium caudolaterale, is densely packed with neurons in a way that is functionally analogous to the mammalian prefrontal cortex. Different architecture, same outcome. Evolution found two completely separate paths to sophisticated thinking. Which, to me, is one of the most profound things biology has ever revealed. Intelligence isn't one shape. It's a principle. Wren: Thread three — A Corvid and People Story. And for this one, I want to talk about something that touches on memory, relationship, and the strange, tender territory where wild animals and humans genuinely connect. Wren: You may have heard of Gabi Mann. She was a little girl in Seattle who started feeding crows in her yard — dropping bits of food, the way kids do — and over time, the crows started bringing her things in return. Small objects. A button. A piece of blue glass. A miniature silver ball. A hinge. Her family documented it carefully, and what emerged was a picture of an ongoing, reciprocal relationship between a child and a neighborhood crow community. The crows weren't trained. Nobody taught them to do this. They seemed to be doing what corvids do with individuals they trust — engaging, reciprocating, participating in a social exchange. Gabi kept the gifts in a special box. She could tell you which crow brought which object. Wren: Now, scientists are careful — and I think rightly so — about the word "gift." We don't want to over-anthropomorphize. But here's what we can say with confidence: crows form long-term associations with specific humans. They distinguish between individuals. They respond differently to people who have fed them versus strangers. And in a number of documented cases, they have placed objects near or for the humans they associate with positive experiences. Whether that's a gift in the way we mean it, or something else — a form of social bonding, a kind of reciprocity behavior — the fact that it happens at all is extraordinary. Wren: And this connects to something bigger that researchers have been exploring: the idea of crow culture. Urban crows, in particular, have been shown to pass behaviors down through generations — not genetically, but socially. A mother crow teaches her chicks which humans are safe, which are dangerous, which spots are good for foraging. Those chicks teach their chicks. A single meaningful encounter between a human and a crow can ripple forward through a local crow community for years. So when you honk at a crow that's sitting in the road, or you feed one, or you make eye contact on your morning walk — you might be starting something. You might be entering a relationship that outlasts your memory of it, even if the crow's memory is just getting started. Wren: There's something in that that I find genuinely moving. These birds are paying attention to us in a way that we almost never pay attention to them. They're tracking us, learning us, building models of who we are. And if we're lucky, if we're kind, we might end up on the right side of a raven's long memory. Or we might end up with a little pile of interesting junk on our doorstep, which honestly sounds like a pretty good deal. Wren: So here's what I keep coming back to, every single time I dig into this research: intelligence didn't happen once. It didn't appear in one lineage, in one skull shape, in one form. It emerged again and again, wherever the pressure was high enough and the time was long enough — in primates, in cetaceans, in corvids, with completely different neural architectures all arriving at the same astonishing destination. That feels important. It feels like it's telling us something about the nature of minds, and maybe about how we define intelligence in the first place. Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams thinking seriously about the future of intelligence, which puts them in very good company with our feathered subjects. If today's episode sparked something for you, please subscribe, share it with someone who needs their assumptions ruffled, and check the link in show notes for the research and stories we talked about today. Stay curious, stay kind to your local crows, and I'll see you next time — right here, on Bird Brains.