It is a short 10 minute talk but comes as a breath of fresh air as it tells you about the intelligence of a bird we take for granted…the crow. We have read time and again about the intelligence of the crow but Joshua Klein adds spice to this knowledge of ours with videos and experiences that do not fail to amuse and excite.
Joshua Klein who calls himself a, “hacker of anything that moves from social systems, computers, networks, institutions, consumer hardware and animal behaviour”, is working as Principle Technologist at Frog Design, “developing health care-related systems and other tools that improve people’s lives.” He tells us of a party he went to 10 years ago where found a friend so distraught with crows that he wanted to kill all of them. Klein started studying them to see if instead of exterminating them, we could build a fruitful relationship with them. And the result of this study is that he has built a vending machine for crows.
The vending machine looks like any other that you have seen, though it coughs up only peanuts. Klein’s experiment begins by, “We put this out in some place where there are many crows. We put coins and peanuts around the base of it... crows come by, and eat the peanuts and get used to the machine being there... they eat up all the peanuts...then they see peanuts on the feeder tray, they hop up and help themselves, then they leave knowing that they can come back anytime for peanuts.” In the next stage Klein explains how they actually learn to put a coin into the machine and get their peanuts. One crow figures it out and then all the crows learn. The first time it happens more by accident.
Klein says this is what shows us the difference between crows and other creatures. “Squirrels, for example, would go away, come back, not find peanuts and go away again. They do this maybe half a dozen times before they get bored, and then they go off…Crows, on the other hand try to figure it out.”
It pecks at the machine till it sees a coin lying about. It picks it up and puts it into the slot. One crow does this and for sometime is the sole user of the machine. Soon all the crows follow suit, looking for coins and dropping them into the vending machine.
Klein is not surprised, for his study of crows reveals how in a city near Tokyo crows drop their lunch near the zebra crossing, get the nuts split by the moving traffic and while the traffic signal is red, hop on to the road and waddle up to the broken nut and pick up the pieces. This is shown in a video so you do not have to go by Klein’s word alone. If one crow learns an art, other crows are quick to learn from their peers.
He also tells you of researchers in the University of Washington who caught some crows, experimented with them and then released them. But for the rest of their stay there and every time they returned, the crows hounded them. Their memory is so good.
Another interesting video he shows is of a crow trying to pull out some meat from a glass. The New Caledonian crow works with a stick. It is not able to pull out the meat. In a second the crow pulls out the stick, bends it a little to make it like a hook and the pulls out its meat.
“So it turns out that crows are really intelligent, their brains are proportionate, in the same proportion as chimpanzee brains are…they are survivors…we have seen a population boom in crows…they are found everywhere except the Arctic…”
Klein suggests we put crows to use to pick up garbage or find expensive components from discarded electronics…” The main thing is can we find some mutually beneficial systems for these species?” asks Klein.
