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Wren: Hey there, and welcome to Bird Brains — the show where being called a bird brain is absolutely, one hundred percent a compliment. I'm Wren, ornithologist, corvid obsessive, and your guide to the surprisingly rich inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Before we dive in, a 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 consulting from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio across the silicon industry. We couldn't do this without them. Now — today we're talking about three crow species you probably haven't heard of, we're going head to head with parrots in a battle of the bird brains, and we've got a story about American crows in the wild that genuinely stopped me mid-coffee this week. Let's go. Wren: Alright, thread one — Corvid Cleverness. And I want to start by asking you something. When you picture a crow using a tool, what do you imagine? Maybe you've seen a video of a New Caledonian crow bending a wire into a hook to fish a bucket of food out of a tube. That one's been around for years and it still blows my mind every time. But here's the thing — that's just one species, in one lab, doing one task. The world of corvid tool use is so much bigger and weirder than that. Let's talk about three crow species that most people have never even heard of, because they are doing things that should genuinely make you rethink what a bird is capable of. Wren: First up — the Hawaiian crow, or ʻAlalā. Now, this bird is functionally extinct in the wild. There are only a few dozen left, and they exist in managed care and reintroduction programs. Heartbreaking, right? But here's the twist — researchers discovered in 2016 that the ʻAlalā is a natural tool user. Not trained, not rewarded into it — just, spontaneously, these birds pick up sticks and use them to extract food from crevices. What makes that extraordinary is that tool use in birds was, for a long time, thought to be a rare fluke. We knew about New Caledonian crows. But when the ʻAlalā showed the same behavior with almost no prompting, it suggested that tool use might be ancestral in certain crow lineages — something baked into the family tree, not a one-off accident of evolution. A bird on the edge of extinction, and it's still out here solving problems. Wren: Then there's the Torresian crow of Australia and New Guinea — sometimes called the Australian crow — which has been documented doing something absolutely wild with cane toads. Cane toads, if you don't know, are poisonous. Lethally so for a lot of Australian wildlife. But Torresian crows figured out that the toad's underside — its belly — isn't toxic. So they flip the toad over, flip it over, and eat from the safe side. That is not instinct. That is learned, cultural knowledge being passed through crow populations. They watched, they experimented, they solved it. And they're still eating cane toads while other animals are dying from touching them. Wren: And then — oh, this one is my favorite — the large-billed crow of Southeast and East Asia. These birds have been observed dropping hard-shelled nuts onto roads and waiting for cars to run them over. Sound familiar? American crows do that too, with walnuts, famously in Japan. But the large-billed crow takes it further — there are accounts of them specifically choosing busy intersections, timing the traffic, and retrieving the cracked nuts during red lights. Red lights! They have learned to read traffic signals. Learned. To. Read. Traffic. Signals. I need a moment. Okay. I'm fine. Let's keep going. Wren: Thread two — How Their Minds Work. And I want to dig into a question that's been buzzing around the bird cognition world for a while now: are crows and parrots clever in the same ways? Because when most people think of a smart bird, they think of a parrot — talking, mimicking, solving puzzles. But Discover Magazine recently highlighted something really important: crow intelligence and parrot intelligence are actually quite different in flavor. Same destination, very different roads. Wren: Here's what I mean. Parrots evolved their smarts largely in a social context — flock living, vocal learning, communication. Their brains are wired for mimicry, for reading social cues within their own species, for flexible vocalizations. African grey parrots, for instance, have demonstrated a grasp of abstract concepts — understanding "same" and "different," even some numerical reasoning. That's remarkable. But corvids? Corvids evolved their intelligence largely around physical problem-solving and cross-species social intelligence. And those are two very different cognitive pressures. Wren: When scientists measure what's called the nidopallium cingulare — the part of the bird brain associated with higher cognition — corvids have a particularly dense concentration of neurons there. And here's something wild: the absolute neuron count in a crow's forebrain is comparable in some ways to that of much larger mammals. The brain is small, yes, but it is packed. It's not about size — it's about architecture. It's about how efficiently those neurons are connected and fired. Wren: And one of the most stunning expressions of corvid cognition is episodic-like memory — the ability to remember not just what happened, but where and when. Western scrub jays — now called California scrub-jays — were studied by Nicola Clayton and her colleagues at Cambridge, and what they found was jaw-dropping. These jays cache food. They hide it. Thousands of items. And they remember not just where each thing is hidden, but when they hid it, and which foods go bad faster. So they prioritize retrieving perishable food first. That's not just memory. That's planning. That's mental time travel — the ability to project yourself into a future moment and act accordingly in the present. Wren: And there's a social layer too. Jays who have stolen food from other jays' caches — because yes, they absolutely do steal from each other — those jays are more likely to re-hide their own caches if they think they were watched. They know what it's like to be a thief, and so they assume others might be thieves too. That's a theory of mind. That's putting yourself in another individual's head. In a bird. In a bird with a brain the size of a walnut. I love this animal so much. Wren: The Yakima Herald-Republic ran a piece recently about American crow intelligence that captured something I think about a lot — the phrase "bird brain" as an insult is being actively dismantled, not by advocates or enthusiasts, but by the crows themselves, just by existing and doing what they do. Every study, every field observation, every walnut dropped on a crosswalk is another nail in the coffin of that tired old insult. And honestly? Good riddance. Wren: Alright, thread three — A Corvid-and-People Story. And this one is close to my heart because it's about something that happens quietly, in backyards and on street corners, and rarely makes the scientific literature — but when it does, it is extraordinary. I'm talking about crows giving gifts. Wren: The most famous documented case involves a girl named Gabi Mann in Seattle. Gabi started feeding the crows in her neighborhood when she was about four years old — accidentally at first, dropping food on her way to the bus stop. The crows noticed. They started following her. She started feeding them deliberately. And then, slowly, the crows started leaving things for her. Buttons. A piece of foam. A small piece of metal. A broken light bulb. A blue plastic heart. A miniature silver ball. Over time, Gabi and her mother built up a collection of dozens of these objects — items the crows had apparently left at the spot where food was given. Wren: Now, is this definitively gift-giving? That's where it gets scientifically nuanced, and I want to be honest with you about that. What we can say is that crows cache objects — they store things — and they have been observed placing objects in locations associated with food exchange. Whether that constitutes intentional gifting in the way humans mean it is genuinely debated. But here's what isn't debated: these crows recognized Gabi and her mother individually. They responded differently to them than to strangers. They had built a specific, individual relationship with specific humans. That part is rock solid science. Wren: We know crows recognize human faces. We know this from controlled studies — researchers at the University of Washington wore specific masks while trapping and banding crows, and those crows subsequently scolded, dive-bombed, and harassed people wearing those masks for years afterward, even recruiting other crows who hadn't been present at the original trapping to join the mobbing. They shared the information socially. They held a grudge. Across years. Across generations of crows learning from older ones who remembered the face. Wren: So when Gabi's crows were leaving objects, what we can say with confidence is this: they knew who she was. They associated her with good things. And they were engaging in some kind of reciprocal exchange behavior. Whether you call that gratitude or culture or just very clever operant conditioning — you decide. But I know which word I reach for first. Wren: What gets me most about stories like Gabi's is what they reveal about the texture of a crow's world. These birds aren't just reacting to their environment. They're tracking individuals across time, building relationships, passing information to their neighbors and their young. There's a social fabric there. A community. And we're part of it — whether we know it or not. Every time you walk past a crow, there's a decent chance it's already clocked your face, assessed whether you're interesting or threatening, and filed you away. You might be in a crow's memory right now. Hi. I hope you left a good impression. Wren: And that's what I keep coming back to when I think about corvids and people. It's not just that they're smart. It's that their intelligence is specifically calibrated for a world that includes us. They've grown up alongside human cities, human garbage, human traffic patterns and traffic lights. They've adapted not just behaviorally but cognitively to an urban world we built without them in mind. And they're thriving. Crows are doing extremely well, thank you very much, while so many other species struggle. And I think that tells us something — that flexibility, that social learning, that willingness to watch and figure out and remember — that is a survival strategy. That is intelligence in its most useful form. Wren: So here's what I want to leave you with today. Intelligence isn't one thing. It doesn't live in one shape of brain or one kind of skull. It shows up in a crow flipping a toad on its back. It shows up in a jay reconsidering where to hide its acorns because someone was watching. It shows up in a small girl's collection of buttons and blue plastic hearts. The natural world is full of minds we're only just beginning to understand — and I think that's one of the most exciting things about being alive right now. Bird Brains is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — and I am so grateful for their support in keeping this show going. If today's episode made you look at a crow a little differently, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could use a little wonder in their week. All the sources and links from today are in the show notes. Stay curious out there. I'll see you next time.