Queen of the corvids: the scientist fighting to save the world’s brainiest birds - The Guardian

Wren: Hey there, Bird Brains — and yes, I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Welcome back to the show where we take one of the laziest insults in the English language and turn it completely on its head. I'm Wren, ornithologist, crow obsessive, and your guide to the wildly underestimated minds living in trees and telephone wires above your head. Huge thanks to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting, silicon development experts covering everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio across the silicon industry. And speaking of remarkable portfolios — today we've got tool-using crows from Hawaii that will genuinely make your jaw drop, some geometry research that puts crows in very elite cognitive company, and a story about one scientist who has dedicated her career to making sure the world's brainiest birds are still around for future generations to marvel at. Let's get into it. Wren: Alright, let's kick things off with something that I think about way too often — corvid tool use. Because when most people picture tool use in animals, they picture chimps. Maybe dolphins. But I promise you, after today, you're going to start picturing a small black bird in Hawaii holding a stick with the precision of a surgeon. Wren: So — the 'Alalā. That's the Hawaiian crow. And if you haven't heard of it, that's partly because it's heartbreaking news: the 'Alalā is extinct in the wild. Every single bird alive today exists in managed conservation facilities. There are only a few dozen of them left on the planet. But here's where the story takes this extraordinary turn — because researchers studying these birds discovered something that stopped the scientific community in its tracks. Wren: Hawaiian crows are natural tool users. And I don't mean they've been trained, or they figured it out after watching humans, or there's one exceptional individual who cracked the code. I mean the vast majority of 'Alalā tested — birds who had never been taught, who were raised in captivity with no exposure to tool use — just picked up sticks and used them to extract food from holes. Spontaneously. Like it was obvious. Wren: To put that in context: out of the entire crow family — the corvids — there are only two species known to use tools as a natural, widespread, population-level behavior. One is the New Caledonian crow, which has become almost famous in cognitive science circles. And the other is the 'Alalā. Two species. Out of dozens of corvids. And one of them is teetering on the edge of existence. Wren: The researchers used PVC tubes with food hidden inside — a classic cognitive test setup — and watched what happened. The birds didn't hesitate. They selected sticks, sometimes modifying them, and went to work. What's especially compelling is that the researchers could rule out social learning as the explanation, because many of these birds had no role models. The behavior appears to be in some sense — and scientists are careful about this word — innate. Built in. Part of what this species is. Wren: And that raises this profound question: what else might be built in to these birds that we'll never get to see, because the wild population is gone? Tool use that evolved over thousands of years in Hawaiian forests — adapted to specific trees, specific prey, specific ecological puzzles — we only get to glimpse it now in controlled settings. It makes conservation feel even more urgent, doesn't it? We're not just losing a bird. We're losing a mind. A whole cognitive tradition. Wren: There's something deeply moving about the fact that even in captivity, even separated from the forests their ancestors navigated, these crows still reach for a stick. Like the knowledge is in their bones. Or rather — in their remarkably well-wired brains. Wren: Okay. So we've established that corvids use tools. But how do they think about the world? What's actually happening inside that compact, feathery skull? Because the brain size argument — people love to bring this up — corvid brains are tiny compared to ours. And yet. And yet. Wren: Here's a study I genuinely cannot stop thinking about. Researchers found that crows appear to understand geometry. Not in a "they can run a maze" kind of way — I mean they demonstrated sensitivity to geometric relationships. The kind of abstract spatial reasoning that we associate with fairly high-level cognition. Wren: The setup involves presenting crows with visual patterns and testing whether they can identify relationships — things like symmetry, proportion, the way shapes relate to each other in space. And crows perform in ways that suggest they're not just memorizing specific images. They're extracting rules. Generalizing principles. That's a fundamentally different cognitive operation than pattern matching, and it's one that puts corvids in company with primates and very few other animals. Wren: Now here's the part that blows my mind every time I think about it — corvids don't have a neocortex. That's the layered, wrinkled outer region of the mammalian brain that we tend to associate with higher cognition. For a long time, scientists assumed that structure was basically a prerequisite for complex thought. If you didn't have a neocortex, the thinking went, you couldn't do the things corvids demonstrably do. Wren: But corvids have this region called the pallium, and particularly a part of it called the nidopallium caudolaterale — which I love saying — and it turns out this region appears to function analogously to the mammalian prefrontal cortex. Same job, completely different architecture. Evolution found two separate paths to the same cognitive destination. That is not a small thing. That is one of the most remarkable examples of convergent evolution we know of. Wren: And it reframes everything. When a crow caches thousands of food items across a landscape, remembers where they all are months later, and adjusts for the fact that other crows might have watched — that's not instinct running a simple program. That's planning. That's theory of mind, arguably. That's a bird imagining what another bird knows and acting accordingly. Wren: There's also the face recognition research — and I'll circle back to this more in our next segment — but briefly: crows remember human faces. Specifically, they remember people who have threatened them, and they will scold those people, sometimes years later, sometimes recruiting other crows to join in. In studies at the University of Washington, researchers wore specific masks while trapping crows, then walked around campus afterward. The crows consistently mobbed the threatening mask and ignored neutral ones. Other crows who'd never been trapped joined in — they'd learned socially which face meant danger. Wren: Think about what that requires. Visual memory across time. Emotional tagging of experiences. Social transmission of information about specific individuals. That is not a bird brain in the dismissive sense. That is a sophisticated social intelligence that, honestly, a lot of humans underestimate because it comes in a small, feathery package. Wren: And look — I think there's something important in recognizing that intelligence isn't one thing. It's not a single ladder with humans at the top and everything else below. It's a landscape with many peaks. Corvids have climbed their own peak, via their own path, and the view from up there is clearly spectacular. Wren: Now I want to tell you about a scientist, because every great corvid story eventually leads to a person who fell completely under their spell. And I think this is one of the most important corvid-and-people stories circulating right now. Wren: There's a researcher — and The Guardian profiled her recently with this wonderful framing of "queen of the corvids" — who has devoted her career to studying and protecting corvid species, particularly some of the rarest and most threatened ones. And what strikes me about her story isn't just the science, impressive as it is. It's the relationship. The way long-term study of corvids changes you. Wren: Because here's the thing about working closely with corvids — they study you back. This is not metaphorical. Corvids observe researchers. They learn individual humans. They test boundaries. Crows in field studies have been documented approaching researchers in ways that suggest genuine curiosity, sometimes bringing objects, sometimes engaging in what can only be described as checking you out. The relationship is genuinely bilateral in a way that working with, say, insects simply is not. Wren: And the conservation dimension here is urgent. Several corvid species are under serious threat — the 'Alalā we already talked about, but also the Mariana crow, the Banggai crow, the white-billed crow — these are birds with small ranges, specific habitat needs, and populations that have crashed. And what makes their loss particularly tragic from a scientific standpoint is that we are losing cognitive complexity we haven't even fully mapped yet. Wren: Think about what we've learned from New Caledonian crows in just a few decades of serious study. They craft hooks from plant material. They select tools for specific tasks. There's evidence of cumulative culture — where tool-making techniques improve across generations because knowledge is passed down and built upon. That was supposed to be uniquely human. Turns out it requires the right kind of mind, not the right kind of DNA. Wren: So when a scientist dedicates her career to these birds — fighting for funding, fighting for habitat protection, fighting to keep captive populations healthy enough that reintroduction is even possible — she's doing something that goes beyond traditional conservation. She's preserving ways of thinking. Cognitive lineages. And I find that remarkably moving. Wren: There's a parallel here to the A I conversations happening everywhere right now — and I know, I know, we're a bird podcast, but stay with me. We spend enormous energy asking what intelligence is, whether machines can have it, what it means for something non-human to reason and plan and problem-solve. And meanwhile, in forests and cities and conservation facilities around the world, there are beings doing exactly that. Beings we've shared this planet with for millions of years. And some of them are disappearing. Wren: The 'Alalā program does offer hope, though. Conservationists have been working on reintroduction — releasing captive-bred birds back into Hawaiian forests, with careful monitoring. It's painstaking work. There are predator challenges, habituation challenges, the complexity of teaching wild skills to birds raised in captivity. But it's happening. These birds are going back to the trees their ancestors navigated. And some of them are picking up sticks. Wren: That image — a captive-bred crow, back in a Hawaiian forest, using a tool — might be the most hopeful thing I know. It's not learned. It's remembered. Across the gap. Through the bottleneck of near-extinction. The knowledge persisted. Wren: If that's not worth fighting for, I genuinely don't know what is. Wren: And that feels like exactly the right place to land today. Intelligence shows up in the most unexpected shapes — in a crow selecting the perfect stick, in a bird remembering your face three years later, in a species holding onto cognitive traditions across the edge of extinction. The natural world is not a backdrop. It is full of minds. Some of them have feathers. Wren: Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three companies that understand a thing or two about intelligence, artificial and otherwise. Wren: If today's episode made you look at the crow on your fence a little differently — good. That's exactly what I'm here for. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share this episode with someone who still thinks "bird brain" is an insult, and check the link in show notes for more on the 'Alalā conservation work, the geometry study, and everything else we talked about today. Wren: Stay curious. The birds are watching.