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Lake Creek Nature Preserve Article Continued from page 6...
out for the crows on a daily basis and soon the birds began to anticipate the daily treats. She was pleasantly surprised when the crows began reciprocating by leaving gifts for Gabi. She got an assortment of small items that would fit in a crow’ s mouth like buttons, paper clips, screws, and even a rotting crab claw!
Here are just a few other examples that demonstrate the intelligence of crows:
• They’ ve been observed bending materials like sticks and wire to retrieve food from small spaces. Alex Taylor, a lecturer at the University of Auckland, was stunned when he watched a New Caledonian crow named Betty make a hook from a piece of wire to pull some food from a tube.
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• Crows will drop rocks into a container to raise the water level in order to reach floating food.
• Their problem-solving skills were observed when they waited for the red light before retrieving food on the street.
• The Magnuson Children’ s Garden watched as one crow taught other crows how to use tools.
• Crows have been tested with various puzzles and have been able to solve them.
Until recently, it was believed that only humans could recognize and differentiate shapes based on geometric regularity.“ Claiming that it is specific to us humans, that only humans can detect geometric regularity, is now falsified,” says Andreas Nieder, a cognitive neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Two tamed crows were shown a computer screen with 6 shapes. In order to get a tasty treat, they had to peck at the shape that was different. The example she gave was 5 moons and 1 flower. Pretty obvious, right? She gradually made the experiment harder. In the end, she showed the crows 4 perfect squares and one shape that very closely resembled a square. It had only one slightly different part. Could they pick it out? Absolutely!
In the journal Science Advances, researchers explain that crows clearly have a sense of right angles, parallel lines, and symmetry. Not even baboons could do it even though they are so much closer in intelligence to us.
While we watch the skies for signs of intelligence, sometimes we overlook the brilliance that lives among us. We’ re discovering remarkable minds right here on Earth. Crows remind us that intelligence wears many faces and is not a uniquely human trait.
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