Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills - Nature

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 pettiest insults in the English language and turn it completely on its head. I'm Wren, ornithologist, corvid obsessive, and your guide to the startling, occasionally unsettling, always astonishing minds of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Big thank you to our sponsors today — Ada, who helps businesses actually integrate A I into their workflows in ways that make sense; Ago Consulting, pronounced "Ahh-Go," your silicon development partners from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio across the silicon industry — we love having them in our corner. Now — today we are talking about ravens that rival great apes, crows that hold grudges like pros, and what all of that tells us about intelligence itself. Let's get into it. Wren: Okay, so let's start with the story that genuinely made me do a double-take when I first read it — because it involves ravens, and it involves great apes, and it involves a question scientists have been wrestling with for decades: is complex cognition something that evolved once, or can it pop up independently in very different lineages? And the answer, it turns out, is a very emphatic "it can absolutely pop up independently," and ravens are one of the best arguments for that. A landmark study published in Nature set out to do something really rigorous — rather than cherry-picking cute anecdotes about clever birds, the researchers gave a battery of cognitive tests to ravens and compared their performance directly against data from great apes — chimps, orangutans, gorillas. These are the animals we usually hold up as the gold standard of non-human intelligence. And the ravens? They matched the apes. Across the board. On physical cognition tasks — things like understanding cause and effect, spatial reasoning, figuring out that if you pull this string, that food moves — the ravens were right there. And on social cognition — reading the intentions of others, understanding what another individual knows or doesn't know — same story. Now here's the part I love to sit with for a second. The last common ancestor of ravens and chimpanzees lived over three hundred million years ago. These animals have been on completely separate evolutionary journeys for an almost incomprehensible stretch of time. Their brains are structured differently. Ravens don't have a neocortex, which is the layered outer brain region we mammals use for higher thinking. And yet they get to the same cognitive destination. That is not a small thing. That's evolution saying, hey, if you live in complex social groups, if you need to plan, if you need to model other minds — here's the toolkit, and it doesn't have to look the same to work the same. Scientists call this convergent evolution, and we see it in things like eyes evolving separately in vertebrates and invertebrates, or flight evolving in birds and bats and insects. But convergent cognition? That's the one that keeps me up at night, in the best way. And for ravens specifically, their social lives demand serious mental horsepower. Wild ravens live in large, dynamic fledgling flocks before they pair up, and in those flocks there are alliances, there are rivalries, there are birds who will steal your cached food the moment you look away. Keeping track of all of that — who's trustworthy, who's a thief, who you owe a favor — that is genuinely complex social accounting. And their brains, or rather the specific regions of their brains, are doing exactly that work. Wren: So that brings us beautifully into our second thread, which is all about how corvid minds actually work — because I think this is where people's assumptions really get scrambled, and I love it. We have this deeply ingrained idea that brain size equals intelligence, and that big wrinkly neocortex is the thing doing all the heavy cognitive lifting. But corvids have been quietly making a mockery of that assumption for years. Here's the thing about corvid brains — they are, relative to body size, among the largest of any bird. But more importantly, a region called the pallium — which is a different structure from our neocortex but seems to do analogous things — is extraordinarily well-developed in crows and ravens. And in recent years, researchers have found that corvid palliums have a surprisingly high density of neurons packed in there, firing away, doing the work. So the architecture is different, but the computational power is comparable. It's like running the same sophisticated software on a completely different operating system. Now, one of my absolute favorite demonstrations of corvid cognitive sophistication is their caching behavior — and specifically, what it reveals about memory and theory of mind. Western scrub jays, which are a corvid you'd find across western North America, cache thousands of food items. They remember not just where they hid things, but what they hid, and — this is the kicker — when they hid it. They know that perishable food degrades over time, and they'll go back to retrieve it sooner than non-perishable food. That's called episodic-like memory — remembering not just facts, but events, with a sense of "when." For a long time we thought that was uniquely human. Then jays went and blew that assumption to pieces. But here's where theory of mind enters the picture. If a scrub jay is being watched by another jay while it caches food, it will wait until the observer leaves, then go back and move its stash to a new location. It only does this re-caching if it has previously been a thief itself — if it knows from experience what it means to steal. Jays that have never stolen food don't bother re-caching when watched. They don't know what to be worried about yet. And that's not just clever — that's projecting your own past experience onto another individual's likely intentions. That is the foundation of theory of mind. And it's happening in an animal with a brain the size of a walnut. So next time someone calls you a bird brain, look them in the eye and say "thank you." Wren: Alright, for our third thread today, I want to bring it a little closer to home — because one of the things I find most moving about corvids is how they navigate their relationships with us. Humans. The loud, unpredictable, occasionally dangerous, frequently food-dropping mammals that have taken over basically every habitat on Earth. Crows and ravens have not retreated from that. They have leaned in. And the research on crow-human relationships is some of the most fascinating work being done in behavioral ecology right now. Let's talk about grudges, because Discover Magazine ran a great piece on this and it connects to some really well-documented science. John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, has spent years studying how crows respond to individual human faces. And what he found — through careful, controlled experiments where researchers wore specific masks while either trapping crows or behaving neutrally — is that crows remember faces. Not vaguely. Specifically. Persistently. Crows that were trapped while a researcher wore a particular "dangerous" mask would scold that mask, mob the person wearing it, and warn other crows — for years afterward. The memory didn't fade. And here's the beautiful, slightly eerie part: crows that weren't even present during the original trapping learned to respond to the dangerous face. They got the memo from other crows. The information spread culturally, through the flock. That is social learning. That is culture. Now, flip that around, and you get one of my favorite stories in all of corvid science — the crow gift-givers. There's a family in Seattle that's been documented receiving gifts from crows for years. Small, shiny objects left on the bird feeder after the family had consistently fed the local crow population. Buttons, a piece of foam, a small screw, a tiny heart-shaped piece of metal. The crows weren't trained to do this. It emerged from a relationship. Researchers are careful about exactly how we interpret this — whether it's reciprocal exchange or something else — but what it shows is that crows are tracking individual humans, they're responding to kindness over time, and their behavior toward us is not random. It is relationship-specific. And I think that matters. Because in cities all over the world, crows are watching us. They know which garbage day has the best pickings, they know which neighbors feed them, they know which streets have the mean dog. They are mapping our world with extraordinary precision. And in doing so — in choosing to live alongside us, to learn us, to remember us — they're doing something that I think deserves our genuine respect. These aren't pests tolerating humans. They're minds, engaging with other minds. Wren: And that, I think, is where I want to leave you today — sitting with that idea of minds engaging with other minds. Because intelligence isn't one thing, and it doesn't live in one type of brain. It evolves wherever life gets complicated enough to demand it. Ravens figuring out great apes' cognitive tests. Jays outsmarting their rivals with a theory of mind. Crows remembering your face, maybe even bringing you a gift. The world is full of intelligence we haven't given enough credit to — and corvids are just the most gloriously in-your-face example of it. This has been Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams who understand that building good intelligence, artificial or otherwise, takes serious craft. If this episode sparked something for you, please subscribe, leave a review, tell a friend — especially a friend who thinks birds are boring, because we both know they're wrong. And check the link in show notes for sources, further reading, and everything we talked about today. Until next time — stay curious, keep looking up, and remember: bird brain is absolutely a compliment.