Are ravens as smart (or smarter) than us? - BBC Earth

Wren: Welcome back to Bird Brains — the show where we take what some people mean as an insult and wear it like a crown. Or, you know, like a shiny bottle cap carefully collected and left as a gift. I'm Wren, ornithologist, lifelong corvid obsessive, and your guide to the startling inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps clients weave A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — your go-to for silicon development from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. We are so glad to have them along for the ride. And what a ride today's episode is — we've got ravens that might make you question your own intelligence, Australian magpies staging what can only be described as a jailbreak, and a story about wolves, death, and the kind of memory that honestly gives me chills. Let's get into it. Wren: Alright, thread one — Corvid Cleverness — and I want to start with a question that sounds like it belongs in a philosophy seminar but is actually being asked by serious cognitive scientists right now: are ravens as smart as us? Maybe smarter in certain ways? Now before you roll your eyes — hear me out. For a long time, the assumption in animal cognition research was that human intelligence was this singular, towering peak. And then we started actually testing other animals rigorously, and things got complicated fast. Ravens, in particular, keep breaking the models. There's a landmark study out of Lund University in Sweden — researchers tested ravens against four-year-old human children across a battery of cognitive tasks. Things like understanding cause and effect, spatial reasoning, reading social cues. And in several of those tasks, the ravens matched or outperformed the children. Now that's not to say ravens are smarter than adult humans in any broad sense — they're not writing poetry or filing taxes. But it tells us something profound: that the kind of flexible, problem-solving intelligence we thought was our special trick evolved independently in birds. Separately. Down a completely different branch of the tree of life. Ravens don't even have a neocortex — that's the brain structure we long assumed was the seat of higher thinking in mammals. Instead, they have a densely packed region called the pallium that does something remarkably similar through completely different architecture. Evolution looked at the same problem — how do you survive in a complex, unpredictable world — and came up with two different answers that arrive at the same destination. That is wild. And practically speaking, what does raven cleverness look like in the field? Tool use. Delay of gratification — ravens will wait to get a better reward, which requires mental time travel, imagining a future state. They deceive each other. A raven who's been watched caching food will go back later and re-hide it — only when the spy isn't looking. They are running a counter-intelligence operation on each other, constantly. So the next time someone calls you a bird brain, just smile. They have no idea what they're saying. Wren: Thread two — How Their Minds Work — and for this one I want to linger on a story that I think is one of the most quietly astonishing things I've ever read about animal cognition. Picture this: researchers in Australia fit five magpies with tiny GPS tracker harnesses. Totally standard wildlife tracking protocol. The goal was simple — map how these birds move through their territory. Should have been straightforward science. Within ten minutes of releasing the birds, something unexpected started happening. One of the magpies went to another bird and began working at the harness clips. Then a second bird joined in. Within an hour — one hour — all five birds had helped remove each other's trackers. Every single harness was gone. Now think about what had to happen for that to unfold. First, one bird had to recognize that something was wrong with another bird — that the harness was an anomaly, a problem to be solved. Then it had to figure out that it could do something about it. Then other birds had to understand what was happening and pitch in. That's theory of mind — understanding that another individual has a need. That's cooperative problem-solving applied to a completely novel situation that no magpie in evolutionary history had ever encountered before. There was no instinct guiding this. These birds improvised. And here's the part that really gets me — Australian magpies aren't even corvids in the strict taxonomic sense, though they're closely related and share a lot of that same cognitive architecture. So this cooperative intelligence appears to have evolved across multiple lineages in similar ways. The researchers, to their credit, called it a failed tracking experiment and a remarkable observation all at once. Because that's science — sometimes your experiment doesn't work and you discover something way more interesting than what you were looking for. These birds essentially said: we see your little harness, we've discussed it, and we've decided no. Collectively. That's not instinct. That's a committee. Wren: Thread three — Corvid and People — and I want to bring two stories together here because they both speak to something that keeps coming up when we talk about ravens specifically: memory. Not the vague, fuzzy kind. Sharp, specific, lasting memory tied to place, to event, to consequence. The first comes from recent research out of the Max Planck Institute — scientists studying wild ravens found that the birds track wolf kills across a landscape. Ravens and wolves have this ancient, genuinely fascinating relationship — ravens follow wolf packs, feed on their kills, and the wolves seem to tolerate it, possibly even benefit from the ravens acting as scouts. But what the researchers found is that ravens remember specific locations where wolves have killed before. They're not just wandering and hoping. They're consulting some internal map, returning to sites where food has historically appeared, sometimes long after a kill has been cleaned up. That kind of spatial memory tied to significant past events — that's episodic-like memory. Remembering not just what, but where and when. And then there's the human dimension of this. There's a community in the Yukon — Old Crow, a Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation community — where ravens are woven into the cultural fabric in deep ways, and where researchers have been working alongside community members to understand the local environment. Ravens there aren't just birds. They're neighbors. They're characters with personalities that people know by name. And that reflects something the science keeps validating — corvids recognize individual humans. They remember faces for years. A crow in Seattle that gets shooed away will remember that person's face and warn other crows about them. A raven in a rural community becomes a known entity, a presence. The relationship between corvids and humans is genuinely bidirectional in ways that most human-wildlife relationships simply aren't. We notice them. They notice us right back — and they remember. There's something humbling and a little spine-tingling about that. You think you're just walking past a crow. That crow is filing you away. Wren: So what do we take from all of this? Tool use, cooperation, episodic memory, social intelligence that spans species — and all of it happening inside skulls roughly the size of a walnut. I think the lesson isn't just that corvids are impressive. It's that intelligence is stranger and more widespread than we ever gave it credit for. It evolved not once, but multiple times, in different shapes, through different neural architectures, solving different problems in different environments. And the animals that are often dismissed, the ones we call pests, nuisances, bird brains — those are sometimes the ones quietly outthinking us. Bird Brains is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams who know a thing or two about building clever systems, so they fit right in here. If today's episode made you look at a crow a little differently, share it with someone who needs that same perspective shift — and subscribe so you never miss a story. Check the link in show notes for sources and further reading on everything we talked about today. Stay curious, keep looking up, and remember — bird brain is a compliment. I'll see you next time.