I've always liked this tidbit from a family that regularly feeds peanuts in the shell to the local crows.<p>>she lost a lens cap in a nearby alley while photographing a bald eagle as it circled over the neighbourhood.<p>She didn't even have to look for it. It was sitting on the edge of the birdbath.<p>Had the crows returned it? Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026</a>
Just don’t mess with craws or birds in general.<p>I had a dispute with a pigeon that was finding my car in my employer’s multi-floor garage and it would defecate on my right mirror, every single day. I tried parking in different spots, different floors, no luck.<p>I had to use my partner’s car for a couple of months to end this.<p>Hopefully the pigeon is not reading this.
> In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences by pecking at brackets of colors and shapes on a screen.<p>I had this funny image of crowns writing Lisp using rainbow-delimiters.
>In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences by pecking at brackets of colors and shapes on a screen. When the crows pecked a correct sequence, a chime sounded and the birds were rewarded with birdseed pellets or mealworms. If they pecked an incorrect sequence, a buzzer blared and the screen went dark for two seconds before the training resumed.<p>>After a few days, the crows learned to peck correct sequences using bracket combinations they hadn’t encountered before at rates significantly higher than chance, Dr. Liao said. They pecked correct patterns at around the same rate as U.S. children and outperformed monkeys from the 2020 study, she said.<p>That was the study<p>>“Our research suggests that recursion isn’t the sole difference between human and animal cognitive ability.”<p>I don't think anyone seriously thought this<p>>Dr. Chomsky said he wasn’t convinced the crow study or earlier work including Dr. Ferrigno’s monkey study demonstrated recursion. He said he believes the ability is innate, not learned.<p>>Rules people use to understand grammar and math go far beyond a crow’s recall of a few sequential patterns, Dr. Chomsky said. “It’s easy to show that humans have the rule in their heads,” he said. “There’s no evidence that corvids have the rule.”<p>Not sure if this is what he means but I also believe the crow's recursion here may not be the same as that of a human. It is possible that the crows are doing the recursion in software, so to speak, and this software is compiled into the crows brain differently from the human, which calls the recursion instruction directly, so to speak. Then the crow might not scale to more complex tasks. This said, I'm sure now that they have found this ability of the crow more complex studies will be held to understand the nature and extent of the crow's ability. It has opened a new area of investigation.
I have befriended and am giving daily treats to a family of three crows for about 6 months now.<p>They are fascinating. Gaining their trust and "interacting" with them has been very meditative.
I often bristle at the implicit hubris in these assumptions about human uniqueness. Why would we assume that humans are the only species capable of understanding recursion? Why is it at all surprising that other animals can understand it too?<p>I'd be much more shocked by a study that provided any sort of evidence that animals cannot understand recursion, but that would probably be more difficult to draw a strong conclusion about.
Full paper:<p><a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356</a> (<i>"Recursive sequence generation in crows"</i>)
It seems like our misestimation of animal intelligence always goes in this direction. Have we discovered recently that any species are less smart than we'd thought? (besides humans, yuk yuk)
This reminds me of a great short story about the intelligence of parrots, "The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang.<p>Full text available here: <a href="https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/" rel="nofollow">https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...</a>
Interestingly, according to Quran it's crow that first taught human how to bury the dead:<p><a href="https://islamicreminder.org/quran-on-crow/" rel="nofollow">https://islamicreminder.org/quran-on-crow/</a>
Of course, our childhood stories of fables and folklores started with The Crow and The Pitcher[1]. I will never forget that story. It is a simple but very effective story to tell kids.<p>1. <a href="https://fablesofaesop.com/the-crow-and-the-pitcher.html" rel="nofollow">https://fablesofaesop.com/the-crow-and-the-pitcher.html</a>