Crows are shockingly smart. Here’s how to make friends with one in four steps. - Upworthy

Wren: Welcome back to Bird Brains — the show where we take the world's greatest accidental compliment and run with it. I'm Wren, ornithologist, corvid obsessive, and your guide to the surprisingly rich inner lives of crows, ravens, magpies, and jays. If someone has ever called you a bird brain, honestly? Take it as a win. Today we've got tool-bending geniuses, a peek inside the crow mind courtesy of some very serious Cambridge researchers, and a story about making friends with a crow that might just change how you think about your neighborhood. But first — a huge thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting covering everything from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. Brilliant minds supporting a show about brilliant birds. I love it. Okay — let's get into it. Wren: So let's kick things off with some pure, uncut corvid cleverness. And I want to tell you about a crow — a New Caledonian crow, specifically — whose behavior stopped scientists in their tracks. New Caledonian crows are already the rock stars of the tool-use world. They live on a small island in the South Pacific and they routinely make and use tools to extract insects from logs and bark. That alone is remarkable. Most animals don't use tools at all. A vanishingly small number actually make them. But these crows? They craft hooks. They find stiff plant stems, strip them, shape them, and fish out grubs with the precision of someone using a tiny bespoke crochet hook. Now, for a while, scientists wondered whether this behavior was something individual birds figured out on their own — little lone geniuses — or whether it was something more cultural, something passed down. And the evidence, as it's built up over the years, really points to the latter. This is a tradition. Young crows learn by watching older ones. The techniques vary slightly between different groups of birds on the island, which is exactly what you'd expect if culture, not just instinct, was driving the behavior. Wren: But here's the detail that New Scientist flagged that I cannot stop thinking about. Researchers observed crows bending tools — actually manipulating the shape of a wire or a plant stem to make it more effective — and the question was whether this was a one-off flash of individual genius or something more widespread. And the findings suggest it might be entirely natural to these birds as a kind. Which means we're not looking at a single outlier crow having a eureka moment. We're potentially looking at a species-level capacity for material innovation. Let that sink in for a second. These birds are not just using what the world hands them. They are reshaping the world to fit their needs. That is, by any reasonable definition, engineering. And they're doing it with a brain roughly the size of a walnut. The next time someone dismisses an idea as coming from a bird brain, I want you to remember the New Caledonian crow bending a hook out of wire to solve a puzzle it had never seen before. That's the bar. That is the bar we are working with. Wren: Alright, let's talk about what's actually happening inside that walnut-sized brain, because this is where it gets philosophically wild. For a long time, the assumption in neuroscience was pretty straightforward — if you want intelligence, you need a big neocortex. That's the wrinkly outer layer of the mammalian brain associated with higher-order thinking. Primates have a lot of it. Humans have an enormous amount of it. Birds, meanwhile, have almost none of it, at least not in the same structural form. So the old story went: birds are instinct machines. Hardwired, not flexible. And then corvids came along and completely blew that story up. Wren: Researchers at the University of Cambridge and elsewhere have spent years probing what corvid cognition actually looks like, and what they've found is startling. Crows and ravens demonstrate behaviors that, in other animals, we'd confidently call planning, self-control, causal reasoning, and even something that looks a lot like an understanding of other minds — what scientists call theory of mind. Let me give you a concrete example of that last one, because it's my favorite. When a Western scrub jay — now called the California scrub jay — caches food, it buries seeds and insects all over its territory to eat later. Pretty normal so far. But here's the twist: if a jay is being watched by another jay while it hides its food, it will come back later and move the cache to a new location. It only does this if it has previously stolen food from other birds itself. Jays who have never stolen don't bother re-hiding. The researchers' interpretation is striking — the bird seems to understand that a thieving onlooker might steal its stash, because it knows from experience that's what thieves do. It is attributing mental states — specifically, intentions — to another individual. That is not instinct. That is something much closer to what we'd call suspicion, or cunning, or just... knowing how the world works. Wren: And the brain structure behind all of this? It turns out birds have a region called the pallium that, while it looks nothing like our neocortex on the outside, does a remarkably similar job on the inside. The neural connectivity, the way information is processed and integrated — it's functionally analogous. Evolution found a completely different route to the same destination. Intelligence, it turns out, is not a single invention. It's something the universe keeps discovering from scratch, in different shapes, in different skulls, on different branches of the tree of life. Cambridge researchers working on corvid cognition have been pretty explicit about this: studying crow minds doesn't just tell us about crows. It tells us something fundamental about what cognition is and how it can arise. These birds are not a curiosity. They are a window. Wren: Okay, now for the part of the show I genuinely love most — the corvid-and-people stories. Because science is wonderful, but there is something about a real, documented relationship between a wild crow and a human being that just gets me every time. So let's talk about how you actually make friends with a crow, because this is apparently a thing people do, and it is absolutely a thing crows do too — on their own terms, in their own time, with their own agenda. The Audubon Society and various wildlife researchers have documented this phenomenon, and the steps are almost comically straightforward. You show up. You bring food — unsalted peanuts are a classic. You don't make sudden movements. You come back again. And again. And again. Crows are watching you the whole time, building a dossier, essentially. They are remarkable face learners. Wren: This face recognition ability has been studied formally. Researchers at the University of Washington — this is the work of John Marzluff and his colleagues — ran experiments where people wore specific masks while trapping and handling crows. The crows remembered those masks. Months later, years later, crows would scold and dive-bomb people wearing those same masks, completely ignoring people in different masks nearby. And they taught other crows. Crows who hadn't been present at the original trapping learned from the ones who had, and they started responding to the threat mask too. The threat knowledge spread through the flock. That is social learning of a specific, personal grudge. These birds are keeping score in ways we are only just beginning to appreciate. Wren: But the flip side of that is equally documented and equally wonderful — the gifts. There are well-known accounts of people who regularly feed crows and who start finding things left in return. Bottle caps. Shiny beads. A piece of foam. A single screw. Small objects, left in the feeding spot as though in exchange. Now, scientists are careful about over-interpreting this — we can't crawl inside a crow's head and confirm it's consciously gift-giving in the way a human would. But the behavior is real, it's been documented multiple times, and the pattern is consistent: food goes in, objects come back out, and the relationship continues to deepen over time. One of the most cited accounts involves a young girl in Seattle named Gabi Mann, who fed crows from the time she was a toddler. By the time she was eight, the crows were leaving her a small collection of found objects with some regularity. Her family documented and photographed everything. Whatever is happening in those transactions, something is happening. The crows are engaging. They are showing up, they are paying attention, and they are, in some sense, participating in a relationship. Wren: And maybe that's the thing that gets me most about corvids, when I sit with it. It's not just that they're clever. Lots of animals solve problems. It's that they seem to be oriented toward the social world in a way that makes room for us. They notice us. They remember us. They respond to how we treat them, individually, over time. That is not background wildlife. That is a neighbor. A complicated, watchful, sometimes grudge-holding, occasionally gift-giving neighbor. And I think we owe them the same quality of attention they're giving us. Wren: So here's where I land today. Intelligence is not a straight line with humans at the top. It's more like a very strange and beautiful bush, branching out in directions we keep failing to anticipate. A crow bending a tool. A jay re-hiding its food because it knows what cheats do. A raven in a wildlife study solving a puzzle in a single attempt that would stump many mammals. And a wild crow deciding, after weeks of careful observation, that you — yes, you with your peanuts and your patient mornings — might just be worth knowing. These are not small things. They are evidence that the world is far more full of minds than we've been giving it credit for. Bird Brains, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — thank you all for making this show possible. If today's episode made you look twice at the crows on your street, then my work here is done. Subscribe wherever you listen, share with someone who could use a little wonder in their week, and check the link in show notes for everything we talked about today. Stay curious out there. I'll see you next time.