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  • You know how a group of crows is called a murder? Turns out that murder can be pretty scary.

  • Hey guys Julia here for DNews

  • so we know how crazy smart animals like dolphins, pigs, chimps and octopuses, octopi are

  • right? Oh god I might have to talk about cephalopods in a future episode, god theyre cool. Anyway,

  • have you thought about that murder of crows sitting outside your house?

  • Yeah those guys are crazy smart.

  • Scientists used to think that one of things that separated humans from animals was the

  • making of and use of tools, like spears and stuff. But that all changed when researchers

  • like Jane Goodall realized that chimps use sticks as tools to get ants out of logs. Suddenly

  • humans didn’t look so smart anymore.

  • Scientists consider the corvid family, which includes crows, magpies, and ravens, some

  • of the smartest among birds.

  • I guess big things come in small packages. Despite that tiny brain span, crows are no

  • bird brains.

  • One of the most famous examples of crow intelligence is the way they make hooks to get food. One

  • study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions B found that crows on New Caledonia,

  • a South Pacific island, take stripes of leaves and shape them into hooks to get food out

  • of tricky places, like grubs out of tree stumps.

  • Another study in PLOS One found that they understand complex concepts like water displacement.

  • Like in Aesops fables when a bird drops a pebble in a glass to raise the water level

  • so he can drink it, they can actually do that.

  • There’s all sorts of stories of crows getting clever for food. In Japan, crows will place

  • walnuts in the middle of the road, then fly away and wait for a car to drive over them,

  • cracking it open. If it doesn’t work the first time, the crow will move the walnut

  • to another place in the road and try again.

  • I mean most human kids don’t know how to use a tool to get something they want before

  • the age of two and can’t understand volume displacement until the age of 5 or 7. So you

  • could say crows are smarter than your average child. that is terrifying.

  • And some studies show that they understand analogies and there’s some anecdotal evidence

  • that crows do stuff for the fun of it, like sledding down a snowy roof on a bottle cap

  • or putting poop in deer’s ears. Yeah I’m not kidding on that one.

  • How do they do this if they have such tiny and different brains. Well one study published

  • in the journal Nature Communications describes how. Most of our big brained smarts lies in

  • the prefrontal cortex. Scientists think this area is responsible for things like reason

  • and controlling emotions. But birds don’t have this. Their smarts evolved convergently,

  • or independently from ours. Instead, the seat of crow’s intelligence lies in the nidopallium

  • caudolaterale. This part of the brain helps the crow form memories, learn and even make

  • predictions.

  • Why did they evolve such complicated brains? I mean they are birds. Researchers think their environment plays

  • a big role. The crow family can be found in variety of ecosystems and eat a variety of

  • food, so they’d have to be able to adapt to changing landscapes. Like humans, they

  • are very social creatures. And solving both social and ecological problems required bigger

  • brains.

  • and one last note, don’t be a dick to a bird. Hell remember. Scientists from the

  • university of Washington found that the birds would remember faces that were mean to them in the past.

  • Whenever the researchers walked around campus, the birds that they had previously

  • captured or trapped would scold them! But not just those birds, other crows that had

  • never been trapped before also scolded the researchers! Which means the crows are a talking.

  • If you piss one off, you might piss off a whole murder.

You know how a group of crows is called a murder? Turns out that murder can be pretty scary.

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