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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

The Threat of Intelligent Crows

Posted by on March 22 at 14:24 PM

Dear whoever created this poster and plastered it around Capitol Hill:

crow.jpg

If your goal was to instill low-level terror and itchy dread, mission accomplished.


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Yay! I know who, and am proud! Wish it had been me. I even have a song with that title up on the stranger's own Band Directory.

Is it like, eating something?

I guess they're evolving, too. Why does it look like a reversed-out goose?

Poster Giant will have that shit torn down by 5 p.m.

I think that's my friend Heather, although she has another name now.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Many crows around UW have colorful plastic braclets on their legs. If accessorizing isn't evidence of intelligence, I don't know what is.

Also, New Caledonian crows make and use tools:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/index.html

"In the wild, the crows make a wide variety of tools from a number of different materials, and we have found that they will also readily do so in captivity, even with unfamiliar materials. They usually remove the leaves and side branches from twigs, and also make tools from other bits of material they find, such as their own moulted feathers (by removing the barbs), cardboard (by tearing it into strips), and leaves. They are even able to use techniques which would not work with natural materials to manufacture a tool for a particular task. We (Weir et al., 2002) found that Betty was able to bend a piece of wire to form a hook, which she then used to pull a bucket containing food from a vertical tube"

They also prefer the fries in McDonald's bags vs. those left in a plain brown bag. So we may be able to fight back by making them too fat to fly.

You know that Hitchcock used an actual event that occurred in Santa Cruz, CA in 1961 to help him with his adaptation of 'The Birds' to film, right?

Crows will drop nuts in intersections in front of cars, wait for the light to change and the cars to pass, crushing the nut, then waiting for the light to turn red again and swoop down and eat the nutmeat.

Why Thank you... I do what I can.
theres more to come...

keep looking...

-LUX->

Can this be made into a t-shirt? I would totally buy it. But, then again, I'm a dorky biologist.

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