The Shocking Intelligence Of Crows: What These Birds Can Really Do Will Stun You - A-Z Animals

Wren: Welcome to Bird Brains — the podcast where being called a bird brain is absolutely the highest compliment you can receive. I'm Wren, ornithologist, crow enthusiast, and your guide into the surprisingly rich inner lives of corvids — crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Big thanks to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts covering everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. Now — today we've got crows sledding down rooftops for fun, scientists raising half a million pounds to study crow brains, and the genuinely spine-tingling question of whether crows hold funerals for their dead. Buckle up. Wren: Okay, let's kick things off with our first thread — Corvid Cleverness — and I want to start with something that made me actually laugh out loud when I first saw it, because it's almost too good to be true. There is a video — and it's been circulating for years, verified, documented, the real deal — of a crow in Russia that found a plastic lid. A jar lid. And this crow took that lid, climbed to the top of a snow-covered roof, placed the lid underneath itself, and sledded down. Wheee. And then — and this is the part — it walked back up and did it again. Repeatedly. Same crow, same lid, same roof. Over and over. Wren: Now why does that matter? Because play — doing something purely for the enjoyment of it, with no immediate survival payoff — is one of the hallmarks of a cognitively complex mind. We see it in primates, in dolphins, in dogs. And here is a crow, improvising a sled out of a piece of plastic, apparently just because it's fun. That is not instinct. Instinct doesn't make you carry your toy back up the hill. That's something closer to joy. Wren: And crow play isn't just anecdotal. Researchers who study corvid behavior have documented all kinds of seemingly playful behavior — ravens in particular are notorious for it. Young ravens will hang upside down from branches, apparently for no reason other than that they can. They'll play tug of war with sticks. They'll tease other animals — wolves, dogs, even bears — seemingly just to get a reaction. There's something deeply recognizable about that. Annoyingly recognizable, if you've ever met a raven. Wren: But here's where the cleverness gets really scientific. Crows — New Caledonian crows specifically — are some of the most accomplished tool users on the planet. Not just "pick up a stick" tool users. I mean crafting tools. Shaping them. New Caledonian crows will take a piece of plant material, strip it, bend it into a hook, and use that hook to extract insects from deep inside bark crevices. They've been documented making tools from materials they've never encountered before in lab settings, adapting on the fly. One famous experiment — the one with Betty the crow at Oxford — showed a crow spontaneously bending a straight wire into a hook to retrieve a bucket of food from a tube. Betty had never seen wire before. She figured it out in one go. Wren: And it goes even further. Researchers have set up multi-step tool problems — puzzles where a crow has to use tool A to get tool B, and then use tool B to get the food. And crows solve them. Not after dozens of tries. Sometimes on the first or second attempt. Which suggests they're not just learning by trial and error — they're doing something that looks a lot like planning ahead. Thinking through the steps before they take them. That, friends, is not the behavior of a creature running on autopilot. That is cognition. Wren: Alright, let's move into our second thread — How Their Minds Work — because here's the thing that trips people up. When we talk about intelligence, we tend to imagine a big brain. Mammals have big brains, right? Primates especially. And so the assumption has always been: big cortex, smart animal. But crows don't have a cortex. Not in the mammalian sense. Their brains are tiny — literally the size of a walnut. So for a long time, scientists just assumed birds couldn't be that smart. Wren: And then the research started catching up, and everything got flipped on its head. It turns out corvids have an extraordinarily dense concentration of neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium — which is functionally analogous to the mammalian cortex even though it looks completely different. Gram for gram, some corvid brains have neuron densities that rival primates. So the architecture is different, but the computational power? Comparable. Evolution found two separate paths to the same destination. That is one of the most exciting ideas in all of neuroscience right now. Wren: Which brings me to a story I love — a crow brainpower research project in the UK that was very nearly lost. Scientists at a British university were deep into a multi-year study of crow cognition — really serious, fundamental research into how corvid brains process information and make decisions. Then Brexit happened, and their EU research funding was cut. The project was in jeopardy. So they did something remarkable: they launched a public appeal. And the public responded. They raised five hundred thousand pounds — from regular people, birders, science fans, folks who just loved crows. Half a million pounds, crowdfunded, to save crow brain research. I cannot think of a more wholesome sentence than that. Wren: And it matters because this kind of research is giving us genuinely new frameworks for understanding intelligence itself. One of the most striking findings in recent corvid research involves something called episodic-like memory — the ability to remember not just what happened, but where and when. Scrub jays — those bold, bright blue corvids you might know from the American West — have been shown to remember where they hid specific foods, what kinds of food they were, and how long ago they hid them. They'll go back for perishable food first if enough time has passed, because they seem to understand that it'll go bad. They are managing a mental pantry. With timestamps. Wren: And face recognition. Oh, this one is wild. Studies — most famously out of the University of Washington — have shown that crows can not only recognize individual human faces, they hold onto that recognition for years. Researchers who had trapped and banded crows while wearing specific masks found that those crows — and sometimes their offspring — would scold, dive-bomb, and recruit other crows to harass anyone wearing those masks, even years later. The crows had taught their family members who to be wary of. They were passing down social information across generations. That is culture. That is literally culture. Wren: Okay, thread three — A Corvid and People Story — and I want to spend some time on something that National Geographic has explored beautifully: the question of whether crows hold funerals for their dead. And I want to be careful here, because this is one of those topics where the science is genuinely fascinating but also genuinely complicated, and I don't want to over-romanticize it. But I also don't want to under-sell it, because what researchers have documented is remarkable. Wren: Here's what happens. When a crow dies — whether from a predator, a collision, whatever — other crows in the area are attracted to the body. They gather. They make noise. They often mob the area, calling loudly, sometimes for extended periods. And then they leave. And after this happens, crows in that area will often avoid the location for a significant period of time. Now — is that a funeral? In the human sense, no. Almost certainly not. But is it something? The researchers think yes. Wren: Kaeli Swift — a corvid researcher who's done some of the most careful work on this — has argued that these gatherings serve a learning function. When crows encounter a dead crow, they're essentially gathering information. Who or what killed this bird? Is there a predator nearby? Is this place dangerous? They're holding a community threat assessment. Which is — okay, not a funeral, but also not nothing. It's a collective response to death that results in shared knowledge. And that is genuinely sophisticated social behavior. Wren: And it connects to something broader about corvid social lives, which are extraordinarily rich. Ravens mate for life and form deep pair bonds — partners spend years together, coordinate on problem-solving, and appear to support each other in conflict situations. Crow families are multigenerational — young crows often stay with their parents for a year or more and help raise younger siblings before going off to breed themselves. They have alliances and rivalries. They remember who helped them and who wronged them. There are documented cases of crows bringing gifts — small shiny objects, buttons, pieces of foil — to humans who regularly feed them. A little girl in Seattle became famous for her relationship with neighborhood crows who left her trinkets in exchange for food she'd put out. Documented. Photographed. Ongoing. Wren: What I keep coming back to is this: corvids live in complex social worlds with long memories, real relationships, and what looks, from the outside, a lot like emotional investment. And the science is increasingly suggesting that whatever's going on inside those walnut-sized brains, it is not simple. It is not automatic. It is something worth taking seriously. Wren: And that, for me, is the heart of what Bird Brains is all about. Intelligence isn't one thing. It doesn't live in one shape of brain or one kind of body. It shows up in places we don't expect — in a crow sliding down a roof for the sheer fun of it, in a family of jays managing a mental pantry, in a gathering of birds around one of their own, paying attention to danger in a way that looks, just a little, like grief. The natural world keeps surprising us. That's not a bug. That's the whole point. Wren: Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode made you see a crow a little differently the next time one looks you dead in the eye — good. That's exactly what I'm here for. 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 have links to the research and stories we talked about today. Stay curious. I'll see you next time.