'Upstart Crow' - who insulted Shakespeare, and why? - University of Leeds

Wren: Welcome back to Bird Brains — the show where being called a bird brain is the highest compliment we know how to give. I'm Wren, ornithologist, corvid obsessive, and your guide to the genuinely astonishing minds living inside feathered skulls. Today we've got tool use, Shakespeare — yes, Shakespeare — a Cambridge lab that got saved by the internet, and some corvids in the Canadian Rockies who are frankly showing the rest of us up. But first, a huge thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who help clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These are the folks who keep the lights on so we can keep talking about birds who are smarter than most of us want to admit. Alright — let's get into it. Wren: So. Tool use. It sounds like a simple thing, right? Pick up an object, use it to get something you couldn't get otherwise. Except for most of animal history, we thought that was basically a human trick. Maybe chimps. Maybe a handful of other primates. And then corvids showed up and completely scrambled that story. The bird I want to talk about today is the New Caledonian crow — Corvus moneduloides — and if you haven't met this species yet, buckle up, because they are something else entirely. New Caledonian crows live on a group of islands in the South Pacific, and they have independently evolved one of the most sophisticated tool cultures we have ever documented in a non-human animal. We're not talking about picking up a stick and poking at something. We're talking about manufacturing tools. Selecting raw materials. Shaping them. And in some cases, using one tool to retrieve another tool, so they can then retrieve food. That's what researchers call sequential tool use, or meta-tool use, and for a long time people thought that kind of layered, means-to-an-end thinking was a hallmark of human cognition. These crows didn't get that memo. Studies have shown that New Caledonian crows will craft hooks from plant stems, stripping leaves and bending the tip just so, to fish grubs out of narrow crevices in wood. They also make what are called stepped-cut tools from pandanus leaves — those are tools with a series of graduated barbs along one side that act like a natural rake. The thing that really gets me is the standardization. Individual crows in different parts of the island make tools that look similar, which suggests this isn't just individual invention — it's cultural transmission. Young crows are watching, learning, and passing this knowledge on. That is a tradition. That is, in a very real sense, technology. And the BBC recently highlighted how a newly documented tool-using crow has joined what they're calling the clever animal elite — a growing list of species we now have to take seriously as sophisticated problem-solvers. Every time we expand that list, it quietly reshapes how we think about where intelligence comes from, and what kind of brain you actually need to generate it. Because a crow brain is tiny. It weighs a few grams. But the density of neurons in the corvid forebrain is comparable to some primate brains, and they've organized that neural real estate in a completely different way than we have. Same destination, wildly different road to get there. Wren: Okay, now let's talk about what's actually going on inside a corvid's head — because the more scientists look, the more astonished they get. One of the most well-studied abilities is episodic-like memory. That's the capacity to remember not just what happened, but where and when. This matters enormously for jays, for instance — western scrub jays, now called California scrub-jays, cache tens of thousands of food items every season. They remember where they hid them, and here's the kicker — they remember how long ago they hid them. Perishable foods, like worms, have a use-by date. Researchers at Cambridge found that these jays will go back and retrieve perishable items first, before they go bad, and only later retrieve the non-perishables. They are running a mental calendar. And the Cambridge corvid cognition lab — which has been central to so much of this research — recently made the news for a very different reason. It was nearly shut down due to funding pressures, and the public response was extraordinary. Donations flooded in from around the world, from people who had never set foot in a laboratory but who simply could not bear the thought of losing the place where so much of what we know about corvid minds was discovered. New Scientist covered the story, and it is one of my favourite science news moments in recent memory, because it shows that people genuinely care about this. They feel a connection to these birds. And I think that's because when you learn what corvids can do, it changes something in you. It's not just impressive — it's humbling. Magpies, for example, are the only non-mammal that has passed the mirror self-recognition test. You put a mark on a magpie that it can only see in a mirror, and it will try to remove the mark from its own body. That's self-awareness. Ravens have been shown to plan for the future — passing up an immediate reward to secure a better tool they'll need later, sometimes after a delay of seventeen hours. Seventeen hours. Ravens have also demonstrated that they understand when they are being watched, and will take elaborate steps to hide their caches from competitors — including going to fake cache sites to throw observers off the scent. They are actively modelling what another individual knows and believes. That is theory of mind. Or something so close to it that the distinction almost doesn't matter practically. The Cambridge lab is the kind of place where those experiments happen, where clever questions get asked in clever ways, and the fact that the public rallied to save it — that gives me enormous hope. Wren: Now I want to bring it back to earth a little, because as much as I love the lab science, some of the most moving corvid stories are the ones that happen in ordinary places, between ordinary people and these extraordinary birds. There's a piece from Jasper Local — Jasper, Alberta, up in the Canadian Rockies — about the corvids of that national park, and it's a lovely little window into what life alongside intelligent birds actually looks like day to day. Ravens and gray jays in places like Jasper have co-existed with humans for a very long time, and that co-existence has shaped their behaviour in fascinating ways. They've learned routines, learned faces, learned which humans are likely to share a meal and which ones aren't. And then there's the broader story of crows in cities, which is one I never get tired of telling. Urban crows are a genuinely different population in terms of behaviour — they've adapted to human schedules, human food, human infrastructure. In Japan, crows in Sendai were famously documented dropping walnuts onto pedestrian crossings, then waiting for cars to crack the shells, then waiting for the pedestrian light to go red before they swooped down to collect the nut. They learned the traffic light sequence. They invented a tool — the car — that they didn't make but figured out how to use. And then there's the classic story of crow gift-giving — the Seattle girl, Gabi Mann, who started leaving food out for crows as a child, and over years received a collection of small gifts in return: buttons, beads, a broken earring, a small piece of glass that turned out to be quite beautiful. John Marzluff at the University of Washington has done extensive research on crow face recognition — showing that crows not only remember individual human faces but pass that information on socially, so that a crow who was never directly threatened by a particular person will still mob them, because it learned the threat from others. That is a reputation system. And speaking of reputations — did you know that crows hold grudges? Documented, lasting grudges. In Marzluff's experiments, crows would scold and dive-bomb researchers who had trapped them, even years later, even when the researcher was wearing a disguise. They remembered. And they told their friends. I don't know about you, but I find that both thrilling and just a little bit terrifying. Wren: And now for something completely unexpected — Shakespeare. The University of Leeds recently revisited the famous phrase "upstart crow," which was used by playwright Robert Greene in 1592 to insult a young, rising William Shakespeare. Greene called him an "upstart crow beautified with our feathers" — meaning Shakespeare was a magpie, a thief, someone who borrowed other people's ideas and dressed them up as his own. And I love this story for two reasons. One, because it shows that corvids have been embedded in our cultural imagination for centuries — crows and magpies as clever, acquisitive, slightly shifty creatures who collect shiny things and get above their station. And two, because the insult itself kind of backfired, didn't it? Because now we use the word "upstart" for anyone who rises dramatically against expectations — and Shakespeare did exactly that. He was the upstart crow who flew higher than anyone thought possible. Sound familiar? Corvids have been underestimated by everyone — by scientists who thought only primates could have complex cognition, by a culture that weaponised the phrase "bird brain" as a synonym for stupidity. And they just kept being brilliant anyway. There's something deeply satisfying about that. Greene probably didn't mean to write a metaphor for the whole history of corvid science, but here we are. Wren: And I think that's exactly the right note to end on. Intelligence is not where we expect to find it, and that's the whole point. It shows up in a tiny feathered skull on a Pacific island, making hooks from leaves. It shows up in a Cambridge lab, saved by strangers who cared. It shows up in the ravens of Jasper, reading the people around them with quiet precision. And it showed up, apparently, in an upstart Elizabethan playwright who stole a little from everyone and made something no one had ever seen before. This has been Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — brilliant partners for a show about brilliant birds. If today's episode made you look up the next time a crow crosses your path, then my work here is done. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share this with someone who still thinks birds are just decoration, and check the link in show notes for everything we talked about today. Stay curious. They certainly are.