Look out for this bird in Hong Kong (as there aren’t many left) - South China Morning Post

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 startling inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Big thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows, Ago Consulting, silicon development consulting from A I to SoC, and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio across the silicon industry. We could not do this without them. And today, oh, we have a good one — we're talking about crows who actually enjoy using tools, what that enjoyment tells us about their minds, and a conservation story out of Hong Kong that I really want you to hear. Let's get into it. Wren: Alright, thread one — Corvid Cleverness — and I want to start with something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks when I read it. Researchers have found that crows don't just use tools. They enjoy it. Like, measurably, demonstrably enjoy it. Now, before we unpack that, let me give you a quick picture of what crow tool use even looks like, because it is extraordinary. New Caledonian crows — these sleek, determined little birds from the South Pacific — are the rock stars of the corvid tool world. They craft hooks out of twigs. They strip leaves to make probes. They will select a stick, carry it to a separate location, and use it to fish grubs out of holes they cannot reach with their beaks. That alone would be impressive. But here's what the recent research is really getting at. When scientists gave crows a choice between a task that required a tool and a task that didn't, the crows consistently gravitated toward the tool-based challenge, even when the non-tool option was easier. They weren't just tolerating the extra effort — they seemed to prefer it. The researchers interpreted this as something like intrinsic motivation. The crows were getting something out of the act of tool use itself — not just the grub at the end of the tunnel. And that is a big deal, because for a long time we thought of animal tool use as purely instrumental. You use the tool, you get the food, transaction complete. But if the process itself is rewarding? That starts to sound a lot more like what we'd call curiosity. Or play. Or — and I say this carefully but sincerely — something that rhymes with satisfaction. What's also fascinating is that New Caledonian crows will sometimes carry tools around with them proactively — before they even have a task to use them on. They're not reacting to a problem. They're anticipating one. That's planning. That's forward thinking. In a bird. With a brain the size of a walnut. Let that marinate. Wren: Now, here's where it gets a little more nuanced — and I love this because science is never just a straight line, is it? There's been some really interesting debate about whether crow tool-making is learned genius or hardwired instinct. A study covered by DongA Science raised this question directly — researchers found that young New Caledonian crows show a predisposition toward making certain tool shapes even without much observation or practice. Which sounds like it might deflate the whole "genius crow" narrative, right? But I'd push back on that framing a little. Instinct and intelligence are not opposites. Humans have instincts too — we're wired to acquire language, to read faces, to fear certain things. That doesn't make us less intelligent. What makes the crow story interesting is that there seems to be a genetic scaffold — a head start, if you will — and then on top of that scaffold, individual crows learn, innovate, and improve. Wild New Caledonian crows in different regions actually make slightly different tool designs. That's cultural variation. That's not just instinct running on autopilot. So the real picture is probably this: the crow comes into the world pre-loaded with some tool-making intuition, and then it builds on that through experience, observation, and what I would not hesitate to call problem-solving joy. The instinct gives them the starting line. The intelligence is how they run the race. Wren: Thread two — How Their Minds Work — and I want to zoom out a little and ask the bigger question that all of this tool use research is pointing toward. What is actually going on inside a corvid brain? Because here's the thing that trips people up. Birds don't have a neocortex. That's the layered, wrinkled outer brain structure that in mammals — including us — is associated with higher-order thinking. For a long time, that absence was treated as a dealbreaker. No neocortex, no complex cognition. Case closed. Except the crows didn't get that memo. What corvids have instead is a region called the pallium — specifically a dense, highly connected area called the nidopallium caudolaterale — which appears to function in ways that are remarkably analogous to the mammalian prefrontal cortex. Same job, different architecture. Evolution found two separate routes to the same destination. Isn't that wild? And the puzzle-solving work really bears this out. Scientists have run corvids through some genuinely fiendish multi-step problems — the kind where you can't just react, you have to plan a sequence of actions in advance. There's a classic experiment where crows had to use a short tool to retrieve a longer tool, and then use the longer tool to get food. That's a two-step meta-tool problem. And they nailed it. Not all of them, not immediately, but enough of them, with enough consistency, that it wasn't luck. What's more, when researchers studied how crows approached these puzzles, they noticed something interesting — crows often pause before acting. They'll look at the problem. They'll look at the tools. Sometimes they'll look away and then look back. It's as if they're running a simulation in their heads before committing to a move. That pause? That's insight. And insight — that sudden "aha" moment — was once considered uniquely human. Then we gave it to great apes. Now we're giving it to crows. I love that. I find that deeply, genuinely exciting. Wren: There's also the memory side of things to consider, and this is where I want to bring in our Hong Kong story, because it connects in a lovely way. The South China Morning Post ran a piece recently asking people to keep their eyes out for a particular corvid species in Hong Kong — numbers are declining, and local awareness matters. The bird in question is part of a broader corvid family that's facing pressure from habitat loss and human encroachment. And one of the reasons conservationists care so much about corvids isn't just their charisma — though honestly, that helps with public engagement — it's that corvids have incredibly long memories and tight social structures. They remember locations, individuals, relationships, and threats across years. Western scrub jays, for instance — now called California scrub jays — have been shown in studies by Nicola Clayton's group at Cambridge to remember not just where they cached food, but what they cached, and when. That's what researchers call episodic-like memory. The what, where, and when of a past event. For a long time that was considered another exclusively human — or at least exclusively primate — ability. The jays blew that assumption apart. So when a corvid population disappears from a city like Hong Kong, you're not just losing a bird. You're losing a lineage of knowledge. Cultural memory. Individuals who knew that corner of the city, who'd learned its rhythms, who'd passed that knowledge to their young. That loss is harder to measure than population numbers, but it's just as real. Wren: Thread three — Crows and People — and this is my favourite thread, I'll be honest, because this is where corvid intelligence gets personal. Crows don't just tolerate us. They pay attention to us. They study us. And occasionally — remarkably — they decide to engage with us on their own terms. You might have heard the story of Gabi Mann, the girl in Seattle who started receiving gifts from crows. Buttons, beads, a small piece of blue glass, a lost earring. Gabi had been feeding a local crow population since she was about four years old, and over time the crows began leaving small objects in her bird bath — apparently in exchange. Her family documented this over years. Researchers who looked into it weren't entirely surprised, because crows are known to cache objects, to pick up shiny or novel items, and to have complex reciprocal relationships with humans they recognize. And that word — recognize — is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Because crows genuinely do recognize individual human faces. John Marzluff at the University of Washington ran a now-famous study where researchers wore specific masks while trapping and banding crows on campus. Weeks, months, even years later, crows who'd never been trapped themselves would scold and dive-bomb people wearing those same masks. They'd told other crows. The information had spread socially. The crows had held a grudge — and shared it. That's not a reflex. That's a social intelligence network operating in real time across an urban landscape. Wren: What I find so moving about the crow-and-human dynamic is that it's genuinely bidirectional. These aren't animals reacting to us. They're animals that have decided, in their own corvid way, that we're worth figuring out. Urban crows in Japan have been documented using car traffic to crack open walnuts — dropping them at crosswalks so vehicles run over them, then waiting for the light to turn red to retrieve the pieces safely. They learned our traffic systems. They built that into their foraging culture. Younger crows in those populations learn it from older ones. It gets passed down. That is culture. That is, in every meaningful sense of the word, a tradition. And I think about that when I hear people use the phrase bird brain as an insult — as if a small brain could only produce small thoughts. The crow didn't need our permission to be intelligent. It didn't need our categories or our benchmarks. It just kept solving problems, keeping score, remembering faces, making tools, and occasionally leaving a shiny button for a little girl in Seattle. On its own terms. In its own time. Wren: So where does all of this leave us? I think it leaves us in a really interesting place — one where intelligence stops being a ladder with humans at the top and starts looking more like a landscape, with peaks appearing in the most unexpected places. A crow pausing before it acts, running the problem through its head. A jay remembering what it hid and when. A raven watching a human face and filing it away for later. These are not accidents. These are minds doing what minds do — making sense of a complicated world. And honestly? The more time I spend with corvid research, the more I think the real bird brains were the ones who assumed birds couldn't think. Bird Brains is brought to you by Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows, Ago Consulting — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC — and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. If this episode made you look at the crow outside your window just a little differently, please subscribe, share it with someone who needs their assumptions gently ruffled, and check the link in show notes for everything we talked about today. Stay curious out there. The birds are watching.