GeoSpy AI: How Artificial Intelligence Finds the Location of Any Photo - Pasquale Pillitteri

Wren: Welcome back to Bird Brains — the show where we take what might be the most underrated insult in the English language and turn it into the highest possible compliment. I'm Wren, ornithologist, corvid obsessive, and your guide to the surprisingly rich inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Wren: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting, pronounced "Ahh-Go," your go-to for silicon development consulting from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses spanning the silicon industry. We genuinely appreciate their support. Wren: And today — oh, today is a good one. We've got Seattle crows that are quietly rewriting the rules of evolution, we're going to get into what science is revealing about how corvid minds actually work from the inside out, and we have a story about ravens and wolves that is going to flip everything you thought you knew about one of nature's most iconic partnerships. Let's get into it. Wren: Okay, so — Corvid Cleverness. Let's start here, because I want to talk about Seattle. Now, I've always had a soft spot for urban crows. They are the corvids who decided, at some point, that humans were basically just very clumsy, very slow vending machines, and they were going to figure us out completely. And it turns out, the crows living in and around Seattle are doing something that is genuinely making researchers stop and take notice. Wren: KUOW, the public radio station up in the Pacific Northwest, recently covered research suggesting that Seattle's American crows are so cognitively sophisticated — and adapting so rapidly to urban life — that they're actually challenging some of our foundational assumptions about how evolution works. And I want to sit with that for a second, because that's not a small claim. Wren: We tend to think of evolution as this slow, grinding process. Millions of years, gradual change, tiny increments. But what researchers are observing in urban crow populations is something that looks much faster — behavioral flexibility, problem-solving innovations, and what some scientists describe as cultural transmission. That's where a behavior is learned and passed on socially, not genetically. One crow figures something out, others watch and copy it, and suddenly you've got a whole population doing something new. Wren: And crows in cities are extraordinary at this. They've been documented using traffic to crack open walnuts — dropping them at intersections and waiting for cars to do the hard work. They learn which garbage collection days are which. They figure out which humans are a threat and which ones are a resource, sometimes within a single encounter. And they remember. They absolutely remember. Wren: What's so exciting about the Seattle research is the scale of it. This isn't one crow in a lab being clever. This is an entire urban population showing signs of accelerated behavioral evolution — adapting to the city faster than the city can adapt to them, honestly. It's the kind of finding that makes you wonder what else we've been underestimating because we assumed intelligence had to look a certain way, in a certain kind of brain. Wren: The American crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, has one of the largest brain-to-body ratios of any bird. And brain size relative to body — particularly the forebrain — correlates strongly with behavioral flexibility and innovation. Seattle's crows aren't outliers. They're just the latest proof that when you give a cognitively flexible animal a complex, dynamic environment, remarkable things happen very quickly. Wren: And that word — flexible — is really the key. It's not just that crows are smart in a fixed, programmed way. It's that they can think around problems. They update. They revise. They innovate. That's the kind of intelligence that thrives in cities, and honestly, it's the kind of intelligence that looks a lot like ours. Wren: Alright, let's shift into our second thread — How Their Minds Work — because I want to stay with what's happening inside a corvid brain when they're doing all of this remarkable stuff. Wren: Here's something I find endlessly fascinating. Birds don't have a neocortex. That's the layered, folded outer region of the mammalian brain that we tend to associate with higher cognition — planning, reasoning, self-awareness. For a long time, neuroscientists basically assumed that if you didn't have a neocortex, you couldn't do those things. And that assumption held for decades. Wren: Then corvids kept doing things they weren't supposed to be able to do. Wren: Western scrub jays — now called California scrub jays — were shown in studies by Nicola Clayton and her colleagues at Cambridge to be capable of what researchers call episodic-like memory. That's the ability to remember not just what happened, but where it happened and when. The "what, where, and when" of a past experience. These jays cache food — they hide it, sometimes thousands of items — and they can remember not just where they put something, but how long ago they put it there. Because some foods go bad faster than others, they'll actually prioritize retrieving perishables before non-perishables. That's not just memory. That's memory organized by time and consequence. Wren: And it goes further. Clayton's research found that if a jay is watched by another jay while caching — if someone's looking over their shoulder, so to speak — and if that watching jay has a history of stealing from others, the caching jay will go back later and re-hide their food. They anticipate being robbed. They take countermeasures. To do that, you have to be able to model another individual's mental state — what they know, what they're likely to do. That's called theory of mind, and it's something we once thought was uniquely human. Wren: So how do they do it without a neocortex? The answer is that the corvid brain has a region called the nidopallium caudolaterale — I know, it's a mouthful — which appears to function analogously to the prefrontal cortex in mammals. Same job, completely different architecture. Evolution found two separate solutions to the problem of advanced cognition. That's called convergent evolution, and it is one of the coolest things in all of biology. Wren: What this tells us is that intelligence isn't a single thing with a single blueprint. It's more like a destination that evolution can reach by different roads. Corvids took a completely different neurological highway and ended up in roughly the same cognitive neighborhood as primates. That should genuinely humble us, and it should make us very excited about what we still don't understand. Wren: When you watch a crow tilt its head and look at you — really look at you — there's something going on in there. Something assessing, processing, deciding. And now we know that behind those amber eyes is a brain that, in its own way, is doing something that rhymes very closely with thought. Wren: Now, for our third thread — A Corvid and People Story — I want to tell you about ravens and wolves. Because this one is genuinely surprising, and I love it when science surprises me. Wren: For years — and I mean years — the conventional wisdom was this: ravens follow wolves. The idea was that ravens are essentially freeloaders on wolf kills. Wolves do the hard work of hunting, ravens show up, ravens eat. It seemed like a clear-cut case of one animal benefiting from another's labor, a relationship called commensalism. Ravens get a meal, wolves are basically indifferent. Wren: But new research reported by Science Daily has turned that story on its head, and the reality is so much more interesting. Wren: It turns out the relationship between ravens and wolves is far more reciprocal — and far more socially complex — than anyone had assumed. Rather than ravens simply trailing wolf packs like feathery shadows waiting for scraps, researchers found that ravens and wolves actually seek each other out. Ravens have been documented leading wolves toward prey. And wolves, rather than chasing ravens off their kills, often tolerate them in ways that go well beyond indifference. Wren: Young wolves, in particular, have been observed playing with ravens. Actual play — chasing, being chased, the kind of boisterous back-and-forth that in any species signals comfort and social familiarity. And ravens will call out when they detect threats, which can alert wolves as well. These aren't two species merely occupying the same space. This looks, in some meaningful way, like a cross-species social bond. Wren: Ravens are extraordinarily social within their own species. They have complex dominance hierarchies, they form pair bonds, they have what researchers describe as individual relationships with specific birds they know over time. Finding out that they extend something like social engagement across species lines is remarkable, but in hindsight — if you know corvids — maybe it shouldn't be that surprising. Wren: Because here's the thing about ravens specifically. They are generalists in the deepest sense. Generalist feeders, yes, but also generalist social animals. They are curious about other minds. There are documented cases of ravens forming attachments to humans — not just tolerating us, but actively seeking out specific individuals, responding differently to people they know versus strangers, and in some cases showing what can only be described as grief when a bonded companion disappears. Wren: Bernd Heinrich, the biologist who spent years living with and studying ravens in the Maine woods, documented this kind of individual relationship in extraordinary detail. His ravens would play with him. They'd bring him things. They'd mob him affectionately. They knew him the way you know a person, not the way a wild animal knows a potential threat. Wren: So the wolf story fits right into this larger picture. Ravens aren't just clever opportunists. They are socially sophisticated, curious, relationship-forming creatures who seem genuinely interested in the minds and movements of others — whether those others have feathers, fur, or are just some ornithologist standing in the Maine snow getting dive-bombed by a bird who considers her a friend. Wren: And honestly? I find that deeply moving. The idea that intelligence, wherever it evolves, tends to reach toward connection. That's not a small thing. Wren: So today we've talked about Seattle crows rewriting the rules of evolution, we've explored how corvid brains achieve primate-level cognition through a completely different neurological architecture, and we've learned that ravens and wolves have a relationship that is far more mutual, far more social, and far more surprising than scientists believed for decades. Wren: The throughline in all of it? Intelligence shows up in places we don't expect, in forms we don't always recognize, and in relationships we sometimes don't look closely enough to see. The natural world is so much richer than our assumptions about it, and corvids are — as always — Exhibit A. Wren: This has been Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you so much for listening. If this episode made you look twice at the next crow you pass on the street — good. That's exactly what it's supposed to do. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share it with someone who needs their mind changed about birds, and check the link in show notes for more on the research we talked about today. Wren: Stay curious, stay humble, and remember — the next time someone calls you a bird brain, say thank you.