Colorado lawmaker says Gabbard has become ‘weapon’ for Trump - Politico

Wren: Hey there, Bird Brains — and yes, I absolutely mean that as a compliment. Welcome back to the show where we take one of the laziest insults in the English language and turn it into the highest praise we know. I'm Wren, ornithologist, lifelong corvid obsessive, and your guide to the surprisingly rich inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Huge thanks to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses weave A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense, Ago Consulting, the silicon development pros taking projects all the way from A I to SoC, and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. We'll hear more from them in a bit. Today we've got a story about crow beaks inspiring the next generation of precision tools, a mind-bending look at what actually makes magpies so clever — and spoiler, it's not what you'd expect — plus a real, documented tale of corvids and humans that I think is going to stick with you. Let's get into it. Wren: Alright, first up — Corvid Cleverness. And I want to talk about crows and tools, because this is a topic that never gets old for me, and new research keeps showing us just how deep this rabbit hole goes. So, here's the setup. New Caledonian crows — these are a specific species out of a Pacific island group, and they are the rock stars of the corvid tool world — these birds don't just pick up a stick and poke at something. They manufacture tools. They select raw materials, they modify them, and they use them with a level of precision that, honestly, puts a lot of primates to shame. And what's gotten researchers really excited recently is the shape of the crow's beak itself. Scientists and engineers writing in Big Think noted that the crow's beak has this elegant, slightly curved, tapered geometry that is extraordinarily good at gripping, maneuvering, and extracting things from tight spaces. We're talking about a beak that acts almost like a pair of precision tweezers — and the natural world perfected this design over millions of years of evolution. Bioengineers are now looking to that beak shape as direct inspiration for new surgical and laboratory tweezers. The idea is called biomimicry — you look at a solution nature already solved and you copy the homework, but legally. And crows have been running this particular experiment for a very long time. What's striking is that New Caledonian crows also make hooked tools from plant stems — they strip a barbed leaf, bend it, and use the hook to fish out grubs from inside logs. They've even been documented crafting tools in a sequence, using one tool to retrieve another tool. That's what researchers call metatool use, and it's rare. It shows planning, it shows an understanding of cause and effect, and it suggests something genuinely sophisticated is going on inside that small, glossy head. So next time someone hands you a pair of tweezers in a lab or an operating room, there's a real chance a crow helped design them. I find that delightful. Wren: Now let's dig into how corvid minds actually work — because this is where things get really interesting, and a little philosophically wobbly in the best possible way. I want to talk about magpies, and specifically about a study that came out recently in The Conversation that stopped me in my tracks. The headline was this: the surprising key to magpie intelligence is not genetic. And I read that and thought — okay, wait. Because we often assume that intelligence, especially in animals, is mostly baked in. It's heritable, it's in the genes, it's fixed at birth. That's the tidy story. But the research on Australian magpies — which, I should say, are not the same as the Eurasian magpie, though both are remarkable — found something different. These birds live in social groups, and the ones that grow up in larger, more complex social groups are measurably smarter. They score higher on cognitive tasks. And when researchers looked at whether this was driven by genetics, it wasn't. It was driven by social experience. Growing up surrounded by more individuals, navigating more relationships, more alliances, more competition, more cooperation — that's what sharpened their minds. The researchers tested birds on things like problem-solving puzzles, and the social environment predicted performance far better than family lineage did. This is huge, because it echoes something we see in primates — the social brain hypothesis — the idea that the demands of living in complex social groups are actually what drove the evolution of big brains and sophisticated cognition in the first place. And here are these magpies, independently arriving at the same destination. The brain is not a static thing you're handed at hatching. It's shaped by the world you move through, the relationships you navigate, the problems your community throws at you. That's a message that resonates a little beyond birds, don't you think? Wren: And I want to stay on magpies for just a moment longer, because there's another thing about them that deserves its own spotlight. Eurasian magpies are one of the very few non-mammal species to pass what's called the mirror self-recognition test. You put a small colored mark on the bird somewhere it can only see in a mirror, and you watch what happens. Great apes pass this test. Dolphins pass it. Elephants pass it. And magpies pass it. They look in the mirror, they notice something is off, and they try to remove the mark from their own body. They recognize that the reflection is themselves. Now there's ongoing debate in the scientific community about exactly what that tells us — whether it maps cleanly onto human-style self-awareness — but what it does tell us is that magpies have a level of self-referential cognition that is genuinely rare on this planet. So the next time someone calls you a magpie as an insult, just know they're accidentally calling you one of the most cognitively sophisticated animals on Earth. You're welcome. Wren: Okay, and now — my favorite part of every episode. The corvid-and-people story. Because as much as I love the lab research, there's something about the documented, real-world interactions between corvids and humans that just gets me every time. So let me tell you about something that has been well-documented in the Pacific Northwest, and that a researcher named John Marzluff — a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington — has studied extensively. Crows remember human faces. Specifically, they remember faces that have wronged them. In a now-famous set of experiments, researchers wore specific masks while trapping and banding wild crows — a perfectly normal and humane research procedure, but understandably startling if you're a crow. And those crows remembered those mask-wearing faces for years. Not just the individual birds that were caught — neighboring crows that witnessed the capture learned to associate the mask with danger. They would scold the masked humans, dive-bomb them, recruit other crows to join in. The grudge spread through the local crow population. What's remarkable is that crows that had never even been trapped would mob the mask-wearing researchers, because they'd learned from others that this particular face meant trouble. That's cultural transmission. That's social learning. One generation teaching the next what to watch out for. And it goes the other direction too. There are many, many documented accounts of crows bringing gifts to humans who feed them regularly. Shiny objects, buttons, bits of foil, small stones — left on the feeding spot like a token of acknowledgment. A girl named Gabi Mann in Seattle became well known for this after she started leaving food for her neighborhood crows as a child. They began leaving her gifts in return — a small lens cap, a piece of frosted glass, a corroded screw, a small pearl-colored button. Her mother kept them all in labeled bags. And the crows also did something else — they retrieved a camera lens cap that had rolled into a pond, and left it on the feeding tray. They seem to track the things that belong to the people who feed them. Now, whether that's intentional reciprocity in a strict philosophical sense is still debated. But the behavior is real, documented, and it is endearing in a way that is very hard to argue with. These are not random acts. These birds are paying attention to you. They are building a model of who you are, what you do, and how to relate to you. And that, to me, is one of the most extraordinary things in the natural world. Wren: So where does all of this leave us? With a crow whose beak is redesigning surgical tools. With magpies whose intelligence was shaped not by their genes but by the richness of their social lives. With urban crows who hold grudges, teach their children, and occasionally leave gifts for the people they've decided to trust. Intelligence, it turns out, is not a single thing that lives in one kind of brain. It's scattered through the natural world in forms we are only just beginning to understand — and sometimes it's looking right back at us from a fence post, with those bright, assessing eyes, deciding exactly what to make of us. This has been Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams of people who know a thing or two about intelligence themselves. If today's episode made you look twice at the next crow you pass on the street, please subscribe, leave a review, tell a friend. The more people who know how remarkable these birds are, the better the world goes for corvids and humans alike. Find links to all the research we talked about today at the link in show notes. Stay curious out there. And remember — being a bird brain is the highest compliment I know how to give.