I’ve seen them soak petrified pizza crusts in my bird-bath.
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Makes for good headlines and arresting imagery, to be sure, but surely a proper control would require something innocuous – a jaunty hat and a bundle of flowers, maybe – so as to reduce the possibility of experimenter bias? A creepy mask and wig may well inadvertently bias the experimenter towards certain threatening behaviors, perhaps.
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The crows or the face mask?
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I, for one, welcome our new social learning overlords.
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I believe it. I had a side job at uni in the psych lab (psych was not my major) taking care of lab rats, setting up their experiments, and so on. I walked in one day to find that most of the rats were lethargic and just too weak to eat; obviously something was going around. Not knowing what else to do, I figured I at least had to keep their strength up by feeding them until their condition could be determined. So I pulverized and moistened their super-hard food pellets and left dollops of that in their cages… an easy to eat porridge of sorts. They ate it up (although very slowly). It actually worked! When the associate prof came in a couple of days later and noted their condition (treatable), he congratulated me on my initiative. That makes me at least as smart as crows!!
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Crows aren’t the only ones. I was witness to a similar occurrence among some feral cats. It freaked me out, yet it also moved me in a strange way.
Humans would do well to spend less effort trying to model machine intelligence, and more effort trying to think like animals.
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Their inventiveness doesn’t end there.
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Wait a minute - crows can figure out crosswalks and humans can’t ?
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This lab has done a ton of work with these masks, so I would think that the controls have been run. They’ve been using the masks since at least 2008:
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have they started bringing you shiny trinkets yet as a show of thanks?
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At least not where I can notice them.
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I now have more respect for snowboarders.
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They do this here! Just up the road from me is a sheep farm, and someone somewhere nearby has a walnut tree or several. The crows drop walnuts on the road and then line up on the wire fence waiting for cars to run over them. We call it the annual crow walnut harvest. It’s awesome. I usually make a point of steering to run over 'em. (There’s really not much traffic here. Like, a car an hour or so.)
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Amongst those crows, you are known as The Man.
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I sure hope so!
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Crows communicate. I’m sure they have a unique squawk or whatever that announces your particular presence and effectively serves as their name for you.
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All in favor of changing it from a murder of crows to a funeral (or wake or inquest) of crows?
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But in the experiment shown in the video, why not just use two different experimenters, instead of one with and without a mask?
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