Monkey See, Monkey Don’t: Wild American Crows Learn from Others Mistakes

Humans have always had a complex relationship with crows. In popular culture, crows are portrayed as agricultural pests, but also admired for their legendary intelligence. The prominent gothic writer, Edgar Allan Poe, even helped popularize the term “murder of crows” in the short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, which describes a gathering of crows. The Greek philosopher, Aesop, also wrote about their cleverness in his fables, the Fox and the Crow and the Crow and the Pitcher. But are these intelligent birds just emotionless harbingers of human death and tricksters?  According to a study published in Animal Behaviour, crows are part of an elite group of animals that mourn the deaths of conspecifics and change their behavior based on the way that the bird died.

In the current study, Dr. John M. Marzluff and Ms. Kaeli N. Swift of the University of Washington, designed an experiment to discover what crows understand about death. The research was carried out by observing urban, free-living crows  on  the sidewalks of Seattle, Washington. The ornithologists, which are scientists who study birds, began the experiment by sprinkling peanuts and cheese puffs on the ground in order to establish a meeting place for the crows. The crows then eventually learned to congregate and eat in that exact area. In a Hannibal Lecter-esque  style, the masked research assistants then presented the group of crows with a taxidermied crow and observed their reaction to the dead crow from a distance. The volunteers were masked because crows can tell individual humans apart. Almost every time the crows were exposed to the crow corpse, the volunteers were mobbed. Mobbing is an antipredator behavior seen in birds that results in them surrounding and attacking a source of threat in order to drive it away. To ensure that this behavior was caused by the presence of the dead bird and not the volunteer, the researchers also introduced a taxidermied pingeon. The volunteer was mobbed by the crows only about 40 percent of the time when they carried the dead pigeon. However, when the volunteers approached the crows empty-handed, the crows flew away and only returned once the individual left.

These results add to a growing cluster of research that proves that corvids, which is the family that crows belong to, execute complex cognition. The process of the birds learning to avoid areas or potential threats from their deceased conspecific describes social learning. Other crows learning these behaviors from the dead have advantages for survival, such as avoiding deadly risks. This study embodies the familiar quote from former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt:  “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself”.

References:

Swift, K. N., & Marzluff, J. M. (2015). Wild American crows gather around their dead to learn about danger. Animal Behaviour, 109, 187-197. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.08.021