We Knew Crows Were Smart But They Turn Out To Be Even Smarter - mindmatters.ai

Wren: Hey there, and welcome to Bird Brains — the show where we take one of the great insults of the English language and turn it into the highest possible compliment. I'm Wren, ornithologist, science communicator, and devoted champion of the corvid family — crows, ravens, magpies, and jays — the birds that have been quietly outsmarting us for millennia. Today we've got a genuinely thrilling episode lined up: we're talking about new research that confirms crows are even cleverer than we already thought, we're cracking open what's actually happening inside those glossy black skulls, and we've got a story about crows and people that'll make you look at your neighbourhood birds in a whole new way. Before we dive in, a huge thank you to our sponsors — Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting, pronounced "Ahh-Go," your silicon development experts covering everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a brilliant portfolio spanning the silicon industry. Okay. Let's get into it. Wren: So — corvid cleverness. Let's start with the headline that honestly made me do a little fist pump when I read it: we knew crows were smart, but it turns out they're even smarter than we thought. Now, I know that sounds like the kind of thing people say every few years about dolphins or octopuses, but stick with me, because the science here is genuinely jaw-dropping. For years, the benchmark for non-human intelligence was this idea of "metacognition" — knowing what you know. It sounds almost philosophical, right? Like, not just solving a problem, but being aware of whether you're confident in your answer. For a long time researchers thought that was a uniquely primate thing. Maybe humans, great apes, a handful of monkeys. And then corvids walked in and absolutely blew that door off its hinges. Wren: Studies looking at New Caledonian crows — those are the rockstars of the tool-using world, living on a small island in the Pacific — have shown that these birds don't just solve multi-step puzzles. They plan for them. They pick up a tool in anticipation of needing it later, even when the reward isn't visible yet. That's future planning. That's mental time travel. And what's remarkable is that New Caledonian crows do this spontaneously, without being trained to do it. They figure it out. In one now-famous series of experiments, crows had to use one tool to retrieve a second tool, which they then used to get food. They weren't just reacting — they were reasoning through a sequence of cause and effect. Wren: And it doesn't stop with New Caledonian crows. Common ravens — the big, theatrical ones you might see on a cliff face or strutting around a campsite — have been tested on what researchers call the "Aesop's fable" task. You know the story: the crow drops stones into a pitcher to raise the water level and reach the floating food. Real crows and ravens do this in labs. They choose heavier objects over lighter ones. They choose solid objects over hollow ones. They even prefer water-filled tubes over sand-filled ones because they understand that displacement works differently. They're not just learning a trick. They are reasoning about the physical properties of the world. That's the kind of thing that used to be considered a hallmark of human childhood development around age five or six. Ravens crack it. Reliably. Wren: And here's what I love most — it's not just the big elaborate experiments. It's the everyday genius. Crows in Japan have been documented placing walnuts on road crossings and then waiting for cars to crack them open. Then — and this is the bit that gets me — they wait for the pedestrian light to go red before hopping out to collect their snack. They figured out traffic lights. Nobody taught them that. They watched, they reasoned, they adapted. If that's a bird brain, I want a bird brain. Wren: Alright, let's go deeper. Because the question I always get asked is: how? How does a brain the size of a walnut do any of this? And this is where the neuroscience gets genuinely exciting. For a long time, the assumption was that intelligence scaled with brain size — and more specifically, with the neocortex, the wrinkly outer layer of the mammalian brain that handles abstract thought and complex reasoning. Birds don't have a neocortex. So the old thinking went: birds are capable of impressive instinct, maybe some learned behaviour, but deep cognition? Probably not. Wren: And then researchers started looking more carefully. What corvids have, instead of a neocortex, is a densely packed region called the pallium — and specifically a part of it called the nidopallium caudolaterale, which I will never stop finding fun to say. This region turns out to be functionally analogous to the prefrontal cortex in mammals — the bit we associate with planning, decision-making, working memory. Same function, completely different architecture. Evolution solved the same problem twice, using different blueprints. That's called convergent evolution, and it is one of the most humbling concepts in all of biology. Wren: What's more, corvid brains have an extraordinarily high neuron-to-brain-mass ratio. A crow has roughly the same relative number of neurons in its pallium as a chimpanzee has in its cortex. So when we say "small brain," we're being misleading. It's a small brain that's packed — almost absurdly dense — with the wiring for intelligence. Think of it less like a cheap little processor and more like a highly miniaturised, incredibly efficient supercomputer. The hardware is different. The output is startlingly similar. Wren: And the evidence for what these brains can do just keeps stacking up. Scrub jays — those vivid blue relatives of crows in North America — have episodic-like memory. They remember not just what they cached, but where, and when. And here's the twist: if a scrub jay has been watched by another bird while caching food, it will go back later and re-hide the food in a new location. Only if it was watched, though. If it cached in private, it doesn't bother. It knows it was observed. It anticipates theft. It acts on that knowledge strategically. That is a theory of mind — the ability to model what another individual knows or believes. It's one of the cognitive abilities considered most distinctly "human." And a jay in a garden is doing it when it buries an acorn. Wren: There's also face recognition — and not just recognising individual birds. Crows recognise individual human faces. Studies at the University of Washington showed that crows in an urban environment will mob and harass specific humans who have previously trapped and handled them — sometimes for years. They pass this knowledge on to other crows. Other crows who weren't even there for the original encounter learn to mob that particular human face. They have a social warning system, transmitted culturally. That is not instinct. That is learned, shared, culturally transmitted knowledge. Like gossip. Very effective, very corvid gossip. Wren: Okay, now I want to tell you a story that I think perfectly captures what it feels like when the line between bird and neighbour starts to blur. Because corvids don't just interact with humans passively — they actively initiate relationships. And perhaps nowhere is this more beautifully documented than in the case of the gift-giving crows of Seattle. Wren: You may have heard a version of this story — it involves a young girl named Gabi Mann, who started feeding crows in her Seattle neighbourhood when she was about four years old. She'd leave out food, the crows would come. Totally normal. But then something shifted. The crows started bringing things back. Small shiny objects. A button. A piece of blue plastic. A hinge. A small pearl-coloured heart. Gabi started collecting them and labelling them. Her mother, Lisa, a wildlife photographer, started documenting it. Over several years, the crows left dozens of objects. Not randomly — specifically, in exchange for food. Tit for tat. You feed us, we bring you things. Wren: Now, crow researchers are always careful to note that we don't fully understand the mechanism here — whether crows are consciously "gifting" in the way we mean it, or whether it's a more complex associative behaviour, a kind of accidental reciprocity. But here's what we do know: crows are intensely observational. They notice patterns. They notice individuals. And they sometimes drop objects near people they're familiar with, in contexts that look, functionally, like exchange. Whether or not a crow thinks "I want to give Gabi a present" the way a human child would, the result is a relationship built on repeated, mutual interaction. And that is remarkable. Wren: What I love about this story is what it reveals about urban corvids specifically. City crows are not just surviving alongside humans — they are reading us. They know our routines. They recognise our faces. They understand that certain humans are safe and others are threats. The ones in Seattle, the ones in Tokyo, the ones hopping around London parks — they have developed what you might call a cultural map of human behaviour. And some of them, apparently, have decided that certain humans are worth cultivating. Wren: There's a raven at the Tower of London — look, I can't talk about corvids and people without at least one Tower of London mention, I'm sorry, it's the law — a raven named Merlina, who disappeared in 2021 and was deeply mourned. The Tower ravens are technically wild birds kept in residence, and each one has a distinct personality documented by the Ravenmaster, a role that has existed for centuries. Merlina in particular was known to play dead — genuinely, dramatically, lying flat on her back with her feet in the air — seemingly for the reaction. For fun. For the attention. Ravens play. They have been filmed sliding down snowy rooftops repeatedly, apparently for the joy of it. Play behaviour, in the animal cognition world, is a significant marker of intelligence. And if you've ever watched a raven, you will believe it immediately. Wren: These birds are not backdrop. They are not scenery. They are neighbours — curious, watchful, opinionated neighbours — and the more we study them, the more we realise that the relationship between corvids and humans goes back a very long way and runs very deep. Indigenous cultures across the Northern Hemisphere have crow and raven figures woven into their cosmologies, often as tricksters, as creators, as beings that bridge worlds. And you know what? Having spent years studying these birds, I find that entirely understandable. Wren: So here we are. We've talked about crows who plan for the future, ravens who understand physics, jays who model other minds, and a little girl in Seattle whose crow neighbours brought her a pearl heart. And the thread running through all of it is the same one that runs through the best science: the universe is stranger and richer and more full of minds than we defaulted to assuming. Intelligence didn't just happen once, in one lineage, on one branch of the evolutionary tree. It happened repeatedly, in different shapes, solving different problems with different tools — sometimes with wings and a beak and a pair of sharp black eyes. Wren: That is the whole reason I made this podcast. Not just to celebrate corvids — though honestly, they deserve every celebration — but to remind us that when we stop assuming, when we actually look and ask and test, the world keeps surprising us. And I think that's worth staying curious about. Wren: 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 or the raven on that rock, then my work here is done. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review if you're feeling generous, and share this with someone who needs their mind changed about birds. All the sources and further reading are in the show notes — the link is right there. Until next time: stay curious, keep looking up, and remember — bird brain is absolutely a compliment.