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Key Takeaways on Crow Intelligence:
Crows are highly intelligent. They can recognize faces, hold grudges, and even recognize cars.
Crows cache food, and will move it if another creature sees them hiding it. They use tools, and fashion tools from twigs, forming them into the right shape for the job, making hooked tools to snag food.
Most of the corvid family, which includes ravens, jackdaws, and jays, as well as crows, seem to try new things, investigate new situations, and take advantage of new opportunities.
In a now-famous experiment, researchers at the University of Washington made some enemies. They trapped, banded, and released wild crows (an upsetting experience for the crows, even though the crows weren’t harmed) while wearing caveman masks. Researchers who weren’t involved in the trapping wore masks that looked like former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.
Later, the researchers returned to the area, again wearing the masks. The crows who had been trapped and banded (and even those who had merely witnessed the trapping) dive-bombed the cavemen, while mostly ignoring the Dick Cheneys. Crows recognize faces and, it seems, hold grudges.
But crows don’t know just your face. They know what kind of car you drive. Kevin McGowan is a crow expert at Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab. He regularly feeds peanuts to a family of crows. They always flew over for their snack when he drove up. Then McGowan traded cars. When he drove up in the new car, the crows ignored him — until the young male in the family saw McGowan’s face.
“And honest to god, he did a double-take,” McGowan recalls. “He looks over, and he looks again because he saw my face. It's like, ‘Oh, I don't know that car.’ And then he looked again, and it's like, ‘Oh, my god, it's Kevin!’ It only took him that one time to learn the car. The next time I drove through their territory, he flew over to me, and the parents did, too.”
What Skills do Crows Have?
Crows also cache food, but they move it if they notice that someone, say a squirrel, sees them hiding it. They not only use tools, they fashion tools from twigs, forming them into the right shape for the job, making hooked tools to snag food. The researchers who documented this behavior said the technology was “analogous to that of early humans.”
Most of the corvid family, which includes ravens, jackdaws, and jays, as well as crows, seem to try new things, investigate new situations, and take advantage of new opportunities, says McGowan. “When you take them into the lab and see what they do, they learn as well as monkeys,” he says.
Read More: 5 of the World’s Most Intelligent Animals
Why Crows are So Smart
Some scientists think big brains developed because social life takes a lot of brain power, at least in complex societies like those of cetaceans, elephants, primates, and, of course, crows, explains Loma Pendergraft, a corvid expert at the University of Washington.
“These are all really intelligent animal groups that also live in really complicated societies, where individuals have relationships to one another.”
And those relationships can get very complicated. Figuring out who you can trust and who you can’t, who’ll be on your side if you get into a conflict, and what another member of the group is up to are all necessary skills for advanced social living, and those skills take big brains.
Testing a Crow's IQ
To figure out just how intelligent crows are, scientists give them what you might think of as an IQ test for crows. This involves seeing how well crows perform tasks, such as choosing which string to pull to get a food treat, figuring out how to open a box, or matching images on cards. These tests all measure crows’ problem-solving skills.
One test that measures the brain power of crows is called the Aesop’s fable test. Named after Aesop’s story “The Crow and the Pitcher.” To pass the test, crows must drop stones into a narrow vessel to raise the water level and bring a food reward within reach. The crows figured it out, matching the cognitive skills of five- to seven-year-old humans, according to researchers who gave crows the Aesop’s test.
But tests like these may not be the best indicator of crows’ intelligence.
“Intelligence is a slippery thing,” says McGowan. “What do you mean by intelligent? Do you mean that a crow can fly down to Argentina and come back and land in exactly the same bush she nested in last year?”
Comparing Crow Intelligence to Humans
Though crows do seem to hold a grudge, they can develop warm relationships with humans. Especially humans who share peanuts. Though it is illegal to keep a pet crow, many people have befriended neighborhood crows.
In the book Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans, corvid expert John Marzluff describes the charms of crows and suggests that we appreciate their company:
“Few wild animals actually knock on your window or ring your doorbell for food. There may be no others that peer into windows, looking for those who have caused them harm. Leaving gifts and assembling dogs by imitating the master’s voice are surely the provenance only of crows," says Marzluff. "Crows do not shy away from testing and using people to get what they need. They challenge us to say no. They invite us to continue our long natural legacy as a member of the biological community, not as one with dominion over it.”
Read More: The More We Learn About Crow Brains, the More Humanlike Their Intelligence Seems
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Animal Behavior. Lasting recognition of threatening people by wild American crows
Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The crafting of hook tools by wild New Caledonian crows
Aesop’s Fables. The Crow and the Pitcher
Avery Hurt is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she writes regularly for a variety of outlets, both print and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She’s the author of Bullet With Your Name on It: What You Will Probably Die From and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, as well as several books for young readers. Avery got her start in journalism while attending university, writing for the school newspaper and editing the student non-fiction magazine. Though she writes about all areas of science, she is particularly interested in neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and AI–interests she developed while earning a degree in philosophy.
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