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Wren: Welcome back to Bird Brains — the show where being called a bird brain is the highest compliment we know how to give. I'm Wren, ornithologist, corvid obsessive, and your guide to the startling inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Huge thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants covering everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. These are folks who think deeply about intelligence — artificial and otherwise — and honestly, they picked the right podcast. Because today we are getting into tool use that would make an engineer blush, the neuroscience of a brain the size of a walnut that somehow outwits a lot of things with much bigger ones, and a true story about crows and humans that is going to make you look at your neighborhood differently. Let's go. Wren: Okay, thread one — Corvid Cleverness — and I want to start with a question. What does it actually take to use a tool? Like, really use one. Not just pick up a stick by accident, but look at a problem, look at the materials around you, and think: I can make something that will solve this. For a long time, scientists thought that was a strictly human thing. Then they thought, okay, maybe great apes. Then maybe dolphins. And then a crow in a lab in New Zealand absolutely blew the doors off the whole conversation. Wren: Her name was Betty. She was a New Caledonian crow, and in 2002, researchers at Oxford University watched her do something no one had planned for. She and another crow named Abel were given a task — retrieve a small bucket of food from inside a vertical tube using hooks. Abel, being Abel, stole Betty's hook. So Betty walked over to a piece of straight wire, bent it into a hook using her beak and her foot, and fished the food out herself. The researchers were so stunned they thought they'd made an error. They ran the trial again. Betty made a hook again. And again. She did it nine out of ten times. Wren: Now here's what makes this remarkable — and I want to be precise here, because this matters. Betty wasn't trained to do this. She wasn't rewarded for bending wire beforehand. She improvised. In the moment. With a material she'd never specifically been prepared to use. That is what cognitive scientists call flexible tool manufacture, and it is extraordinarily rare in the animal kingdom. Wren: New Caledonian crows in the wild are already famous for this. They craft tools from pandanus leaves — they'll tear a hooked strip, shape the tip, and use it to probe for grubs in tree bark. And researchers have found something fascinating: there's actually regional variation in how they make these tools. Different populations on the island make slightly different designs. Which means they're not just instinctively producing a fixed tool — they're learning from each other, and local traditions are being passed down. That is culture. Tool culture, in a bird. Wren: And it doesn't stop with New Caledonian crows. Rooks — that's a European corvid — have been shown to drop stones into water-filled tubes to raise the water level and reach floating food, just like the Aesop's fable. When researchers at Cambridge tested this, the rooks chose large stones over small ones, solid over hollow, and they only dropped stones in the tube with water, not the one without. They understood cause and effect. They were reasoning about the physical world. A rook. Doing physics. Wren: So the next time someone calls you a bird brain, just smile. Because honestly? That's a tremendous endorsement of your problem-solving abilities. Wren: Thread two — How Their Minds Work — and this is where I get a little nerdy and I make no apologies. Because the question of how corvids are this smart is one of the most genuinely exciting puzzles in neuroscience right now. And it starts with a kind of beautiful irony. Wren: For most of the twentieth century, the dominant assumption in brain science was that intelligence scaled with the size of your neocortex. The neocortex is the wrinkly outer layer of the mammalian brain — it's where higher-order thinking happens, planning, decision-making, creativity. Birds don't have a neocortex. So the logic went: birds can't really think in sophisticated ways. And for decades, that was more or less the end of the conversation. Wren: Except then scientists started actually testing corvids. And corvids kept passing tests. And the explanations of why that couldn't possibly mean what it looked like got increasingly tortured. Until researchers started looking at bird brains more carefully — and found something remarkable. Crows and ravens have a region of the brain called the pallium, and specifically a part called the nidopallium caudolaterale, which functions in ways that are strikingly similar to the mammalian prefrontal cortex. Same job, completely different architecture. Evolution, it turns out, invented sophisticated cognition at least twice. Maybe more. Wren: And the neuron density in corvid brains is extraordinary. A crow's brain, relative to its body size, has a neuron density comparable to some primates. They're packing an enormous amount of computational power into a very small space. National Geographic has explored this in some depth — the idea that birdbrain, as an insult, fundamentally misunderstands what a bird brain actually is. It's not a simpler version of our brain. It's a different solution to the same problem. Wren: One of the most striking demonstrations of corvid cognition is what researchers call the marshmallow test — delayed gratification. You may know the human version, where children are offered one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later. It's used as a rough measure of impulse control and future planning. When researchers ran analogous experiments with ravens, the birds would give up a piece of bread — food they already had — in exchange for a token they could later trade for a better food item. They were trading present reward for future gain. Planning ahead. Thinking about a time that didn't exist yet. Wren: And then there's episodic-like memory. Western scrub jays — now called California scrub-jays — were studied by Nicola Clayton at Cambridge, and found to remember not just where they cached food, but what they cached and when. They'd return to perishable food items first, before those items went bad. They were organizing their memories by content and time. That's called www memory — what, where, when. It was previously thought to be uniquely human. Wren: The Conversation recently ran a piece asking, are crows really that clever? And I love that question because the honest answer is: yes, but it's more interesting than just clever. They're clever in ways that force us to rethink what cleverness even is, and where it comes from. Intelligence isn't one thing. It's a family of solutions. And corvids found some of them completely independently of us. Wren: Thread three — a Corvid and People story — and this one is about gifts. Because if you want a story that makes the case that crows see us, really see us, as individuals in their world — this is it. Wren: A girl named Gabi Mann grew up in Seattle, and starting when she was around four years old, she began sharing food with the crows in her neighborhood. Crackers, bits of lunch, whatever she had. And the crows noticed. They started following her. And then something unexpected happened. They started leaving things for her. Wren: Over the years, Gabi collected a remarkable assortment of items from the crows — small pieces of glass, a corroded earring, a blue button, a miniature silver ball, a piece of foam with the letters L-O-V on it. Trinkets. Gifts. Her mother kept them in labeled bags, each one noted with the date it was found near the bird bath where the exchanges happened. Researchers who studied this case, including wildlife biologist John Marzluff at the University of Washington, have spent years documenting similar behaviors and the mechanisms behind them. Crows remember faces. Marzluff's own research — which involved people wearing masks and either harassing or feeding crows — showed that crows would respond negatively to the threatening mask wearer for years. They'd scold them, dive at them, and they taught their fledglings to do the same to that face. Wren: So the gift-giving isn't mysterious. It's a social behavior. Crows form relationships with individuals. They track reputations. When Gabi fed them, she became a known, trusted, generous entity in their world. And they responded the way social creatures respond to generous individuals — they reciprocated. Now, whether they consciously intend it as a gift the way we would mean a gift — scientists are appropriately careful about that. But the behavior is real. The relationship is real. And it's documented. Wren: John Marzluff and his colleagues have also found that in urban environments, crows are adapting their behavior in sophisticated ways. They've learned traffic patterns — using roads as tools, essentially, dropping hard nuts in front of cars and then waiting for the light to change before retrieving the crushed pieces. This behavior has been documented in Tokyo and in cities across North America. They're using human infrastructure. They figured out our systems and slotted themselves into them. Wren: There's a community in a neighborhood in Sunol, California where a wild crow was spotted regularly carrying a piece of wire and a few other odd objects — behaviors that onlookers described as the crow seeming to play, to experiment with objects recreationally. Play is considered a marker of cognitive sophistication because it requires imagination — trying out behaviors without immediate survival payoff. Corvids play. Ravens especially have been documented sliding down snowy rooftops repeatedly, apparently for the sheer enjoyment of it. Young ravens play tug of war. They dangle from branches upside down. They tease other animals and then flee, which — honestly — feels deeply relatable. Wren: And what strikes me about all of this — the gift-giving, the urban tool use, the play — is that these are not behaviors happening in a lab. These are wild animals, making choices about how to engage with the world and with us. They chose to bring Gabi her blue button. They chose to wait at the crosswalk. They chose to slide down the roof again. That's not instinct running on rails. That's something that looks, from where I'm standing, a lot like curiosity. Wren: So here's where I want to leave you today. Intelligence — real, flexible, creative intelligence — is not the exclusive property of big-brained mammals in lab coats. It evolved because the world is complicated, and complicated worlds reward the ability to learn, to plan, to relate to others, to solve new problems. Corvids found that path. Completely independently. With different hardware, different brain architecture, and a completely different evolutionary history from ours. And they are out there right now, in your neighborhood, watching you, remembering your face, and possibly — just possibly — deciding whether you're worth a blue button. 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, good — that was the whole idea. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review if you're feeling generous, and share this with someone who still thinks bird brain is an insult. Show notes with links to the research and articles we talked about today are in the link in show notes. Stay curious, keep looking up, and I'll see you next time.