Allies and Open Sources: Lessons from Northern Raven, the Largest OSINT Collection Operation in NATO’s History - Modern War Institute -

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 into a love letter. I'm Wren, ornithologist, corvid obsessive, and your guide to the surprisingly rich inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. Huge thanks to our sponsors today — Ada, who helps clients weave A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways; Ago Consulting, pronounced "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 across the silicon industry — brilliant minds building brilliant things, which honestly feels very on-brand for a show about the world's most brilliant birds. Today we've got a genuinely exciting episode — we're talking about what happens inside a crow's brain when it picks up a tool, why some crows are just better at this than others, and what that tells us about intelligence itself. Plus a story about crows and people that I think will stay with you. Let's get into it. Wren: Alright, thread one — Corvid Cleverness — and oh, do I have a treat for you. So researchers have recently confirmed something that I think a lot of corvid watchers have long suspected: crows don't just use tools because they have to. They actually enjoy it. Like, genuinely seem to get a kick out of the whole process. A study that made waves recently found that American crows will engage with tools even in situations where the reward isn't guaranteed — they'll pick up a stick, manipulate it, poke around with it, almost like they're playing. And that is a big deal, because in the animal kingdom, intrinsic motivation — doing something for the love of doing it — is considered a hallmark of higher cognition. We see it in primates. We see it in dolphins. And now we're seeing it clearly in crows. Wren: So let's set the scene, because I want you to really picture this. You've got a crow — let's say she's perched at the edge of a puzzle box. Inside there's a food reward, tucked just out of reach. Nearby, there's a stick. Now, a lot of animals in this situation will sniff around, maybe paw at the box, give up, move on. But this crow? She looks at the stick. She looks at the box. She picks up the stick, angles it just so, and retrieves the food. Textbook tool use. But here's what the researchers noticed — even after the food was gone, even after the reward was removed from the equation, some crows kept fiddling with the tools. They'd carry them around, try different angles, experiment. That's not hunger driving them. That's curiosity. That's engagement. That's, dare I say it, fun. Wren: And tool use in crows isn't some rare party trick. Wild New Caledonian crows — a species that corvid researchers basically treat as the rock stars of the bird world — are famous for fashioning hooks out of plant stems to fish grubs out of crevices. They'll select a tool based on the task at hand. They'll even carry a preferred tool from site to site, which implies they're thinking ahead — "I'm going to need this later." That's planning. That's future-oriented cognition. In a bird. With a brain the size of a walnut. I will never stop being delighted by this. Wren: What I love about the enjoyment angle is what it implies about learning. If crows are intrinsically motivated to play with tools, that means they're practicing. They're building skills the way a kid builds skills by playing with blocks — not because someone told them to, but because it's inherently satisfying. And that kind of self-directed learning produces really robust, flexible problem-solvers. Which, if you've ever watched a crow figure out how to open your rubbish bin, you already knew. Wren: Thread two — How Their Minds Work — and this one goes deep, so buckle in, because we're talking about neuroscience. Crow neuroscience. Which is a sentence I never get tired of saying. Wren: So here's the thing about bird brains — and I mean that literally, anatomically — they don't look like mammal brains. For a long time, scientists assumed that because birds lack a neocortex — that thick, wrinkled outer layer that we associate with higher thinking in mammals — they must be, well, simpler. And that assumption was wrong. Spectacularly, embarrassingly wrong. What birds have instead is a region called the pallium, and in corvids especially, parts of the pallium are doing work that's remarkably analogous to what our prefrontal cortex does — planning, decision-making, flexible thinking. Wren: Now, a fascinating study published in Nature took this a step further specifically in the context of tool use. Researchers looked at American crows — crows that vary naturally in their tool-using ability — and they found something remarkable. The crows that were better at using tools weren't just smarter in some general, diffuse way. They were activating distinct neural circuits compared to their less talented counterparts. Specific brain regions were lighting up differently in the skilled tool users. What this suggests is that tool-use proficiency in crows has a real neurological signature — it's not just about raw intelligence, it's about how the brain is wired and recruited for a particular kind of task. Wren: Think about what that means. We know in humans that expert musicians activate their motor cortex differently than novices. Expert chess players recruit different parts of their brains than beginners. The brain physically reorganizes itself around skill. And now we're seeing echoes of that same principle in corvids. The brain of a crow that's really good at using a stick to retrieve food looks functionally different — in the moment of doing it — from the brain of a crow that struggles with the same task. That is not a simple animal doing a simple thing. That is a complex cognitive system doing complex cognitive work. Wren: And it raises beautiful questions. Is tool-use skill in crows partly heritable — are some crows just born with a more tool-ready neural architecture? Or is it all about early experience and practice? Probably both, right? Which is also how it works in us. Nature and nurture, endlessly tangled, endlessly interesting. Researchers are actively working on untangling that in corvids, and I cannot wait to see where that goes. Wren: What I want you to take away from this is that when a crow picks up a stick, it isn't a reflex. It isn't a fixed behavior baked into instinct. Something is happening in that bird's mind — circuits are firing, information is being processed, decisions are being made. There's a there there. And the more we look, the more intricate that "there" turns out to be. Wren: Thread three — A Corvid and People Story — and I've saved this one because I think it perfectly captures why I fell in love with these birds in the first place. Wren: So let me tell you about a girl named Gabi Mann, who lives in Seattle, and who has one of the most extraordinary relationships with wild animals I've ever come across. Gabi started feeding crows when she was about four years old — mostly by accident, dropping bits of food from her lunch. The crows noticed. Of course they noticed. Crows always notice. And they started showing up more regularly around her house. Wren: Her family began deliberately feeding the local crow population — putting out food, water, keeping a consistent routine. And the crows responded to that reliability in a way that is, depending on your perspective, either very sweet or slightly eerie. They started bringing gifts. Small, shiny objects left at the feeding station after a meal. A button. A piece of blue glass. A small screw. A heart-shaped charm. A miniature light-bulb. Over the years, the gifts accumulated into a genuine little collection. Gabi kept them all, labelled by date. Wren: Now, I want to be careful here, because it's very easy to over-romanticize this, and I've got a scientific reputation to protect. What's actually happening, as best researchers can tell, is a behavior that crows exhibit in various forms — reciprocal exchange, possibly related to the same social intelligence that makes them such effective cooperators within their own groups. Crows are exquisitely attuned to social relationships. They track who fed them, who chased them, who ignored them. They remember faces — genuinely remember human faces, as shown in controlled studies where researchers wore specific masks and found that crows treated those masked faces with either hostility or friendliness depending on past interactions, even years later. So a crow that associates you with reliable food and safety — that crow has filed you away as important. And for an animal with strong social instincts, important relationships sometimes generate reciprocal behavior. Wren: Whether you call it gift-giving or something else, what's undeniable is the selectivity. These weren't random objects dropped by accident. They were brought consistently, to the same spot, after eating. That's not noise. That's signal. And to me, what's most moving about Gabi's story isn't the gifts themselves — it's the relationship. She grew up with these birds. She knew individual crows. They knew her. That kind of cross-species recognition, that mutual awareness, across such a vast evolutionary distance — a girl and a crow, watching each other — I find that genuinely profound. Wren: And it's not just Gabi. There are documented cases of ravens forming long-term bonds with individual humans — falconers, researchers, keepers — showing different behavior with them than with strangers. There are urban crow communities that appear to pass down cultural information about which humans to avoid and which to trust. There are stories from researchers who've worked with corvids for years and will tell you, quietly, that these animals know you. Not in a vague generic way. They know you specifically. They have a mental model of you. And that is both wonderful and a little humbling, honestly. Wren: Here's what I keep coming back to, every time I put together an episode of this show. Intelligence is not a ladder with humans at the top. It's more like a forest — full of different kinds of minds, shaped by different pressures, expressed in different ways, all of them solving the problem of being alive in a complicated world. Crows solved that problem by being social, curious, adaptable, and — as we now know from the neuroscience — genuinely skilled in ways that leave distinct marks on their brains. That's not a lesser version of intelligence. That's intelligence, full stop. Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams that know a thing or two about building smarter systems, which means they get it. Stay curious, friends. Subscribe if you haven't, share the show with someone who still uses "bird brain" as an insult — because after today, they'll know better. Show notes have the links to all the research we talked about, and I'll be back soon with more stories that I promise will make you look at your neighbourhood birds just a little differently. Until then — keep watching the sky.