Factually! with Adam Conover - The Spectacular Social Lives of Crows with Anne B. Clark

Episode Date: September 15, 2021

Crows may seem like garbage birds that only live to pick through trash on your street, but they're actually some of the most intelligent animals on Earth, with complex social relations and a bona fide culture. On the show this week Anne B. Clark, Professor at Binghamton University joins Adam to talk about what makes these feathered friends so freaking fascinating! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way I don't know what to think I don't know what to say Yeah, but that's alright Yeah, that's okay I don't know anything Hello everyone, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things they know that you probably don't know that I definitely don't know. And as both of our minds get blown together, that's how I'm introducing the show. I think it's pretty good. I think it's a pretty good description. Let's jump into this episode. You know, I might have mentioned this on the show at some point, but I am a bird watcher now. I watch birds. Okay, get over it. It's what I do. I'm not going to stop just because you don't like it. It's a hobby that I took up in one of the earlier stages of the pandemic and I fucking love it. It's an incredible way to spend time outside without wondering, okay, what do I do now? You know what I mean? The most time you go outside, you're like, it's nice to be outside, but like, does my computer miss me? Should I pull out my phone? What's going on? And you know, when you birdwatch, you go outside and then you look for birds. Two hours fly by. It's amazing.

Gives you something to do outside. And also you get to participate in a big citizen science project, report how many birds you saw or an ethologist can use that to track bird positions. It's fucking awesome. I can't shut up about it. But let me tell you one of my favorite things about birdwatching, okay, which is that I live in Los Angeles and I normally think of this place as like a, you know, a concrete blasted wasteland, you know, no natural anything around except a couple of barren palm trees that are going to die in a couple of years. But once I started birdwatching, I realized that I am actually surrounded by the natural world and in all of its fascinating glory. You know, I walked to the LA River to birdwatch and it has a reputation, the LA River, for being shitty, you know, a concrete

channel that's barely a river at all. But when I go there, I've been going there over the past year and I have seen over a hundred different species of bird in that area, in the surrounding area. I've been able to see how the seasons change, how the ducks come in winter and the swallows come in. Well, actually, I haven't quite tracked when the swallows come yet, but ducks definitely come in winter. At least I will verify that this coming winter. I've only been doing this for about a year so far, okay?

But here's the point. Birding has made me aware of a whole world of natural beauty and complexity just down the street from my house. Take crows, for example. You know, I always assumed that crows were kind of a trash bird. You know, there's so many of them. They eat garbage. They fly around. I classified them with like rats or pigeons. You know what I mean? But dear listener, I could not have been more wrong, okay? Because as we will talk about today, crows are actually one of the most intelligent species of any animal on earth. They have complex social hierarchies.

They can recognize individual other crows and even individual humans. They even communicate so thoroughly, crows can actually be said to have a culture. They are crazy intelligent. They can solve eight-part puzzles to get food. They can even think about their own thoughts, which as a form of higher intelligence thought to only be found in humans until we found out it also happens in crows. And the coolest part is if you live in

America, there are crows near you. We're not talking about chimps. You don't got to go to the jungle to find these guys. You just literally have to go look outside. So if you see a crow today, you have the choice. This is what bird watching has taught me. If you see a crow, you have the choice to look at it, to observe something that is so unique on earth, right in your own neighborhood. Just because something is common to you doesn't mean it's not special. And you know, my guest today has made a career out of doing that exact thing. Today on the show, we have Anne Clark, a professor of biological science at Binghamton University. I think you are going to flip for this interview. I certainly did. Please welcome Anne Clark. Anne Clark,

thank you so much for being here. Thanks a lot for having me, Adam. It's a delight to be on the show and chat today. Yeah. So look, I started, just so you know, I started birding in my life about a year ago. And so I became, I've only recently become alive to the possibility of birds in my life and everything that they do. I'm very excited to drill deep and talk about one bird species in particular. Why did you start studying crows? And what have you discovered? Start with why. So why crows in particular? Why? Why crows? Well, I'll tell you. It's actually strange because I didn't start with birds and I don't consider myself a dyed-in-wool ornithologist in the sense that I have any formal training in birds at all. Actually, most of what I do,

I don't have any formal training in, but that's all right. That's what happens in academia. But the basic line is I started working with prosimian primates, and I've always been interested in the evolution of complex social behavior. Why do animals not just live in groups, but spend a lot of effort and time in coming together again and communicating with certain individuals, even if they don't live in a tight social group? I mean, we're a case in point. You know, all your best friends don't travel around with you

five feet away from you. So you make time and effort to get there. Why do you do that? And so that is a sort of central academic behavioral ecologist question. What are the circumstances, the context in which complex social behavior evolves and is maintained. And I was interested also in how animals with long lives diverge. So there was a parallel interest in what we now call personality, but what didn't have a term when I was getting interested. And when I got back from South Africa and studying prosimians, for one reason or another, I got into studying budgies, little parakeets. Little parakeet birds, yeah. The guys at the pet store. Okay, yeah.

And they have very complex social lives, but I wanted to work with wild animals in their wild context, and by a circuitous route, ended up realizing that a colleague of mine studying American crows had the perfect system, which is long-lived animals, take a long time to grow up, observable to an extent, time to grow up, observable to an extent, and very complex social lives. So I actually made a jump from what I was doing then, studying parent-offspring relations in red-winged blackbirds, to working with crows. You started studying crows in order to study social relationships in animals more generally, because it was a really good example of that. Yeah. And, and particularly I'd gotten really interested in animals that don't live in tight social groups. So if you come, if you're a primatologist, when I grew up in academia, you studied baboons and rhesus monkeys, And these are big open living, open country living species.

And they live in a defined social group. But they're in all the time. All the time. So they travel in their group. And I was working with prosimian primates with bush babies, which are sort of squirrel-like um supposedly primitive oh very cute very cute and bite um okay so not so cute well they're cute but they you know they will rend flesh but they're adorable yeah yeah yeah yes, exactly. And I had been studying them in the wild. And the basic discovery that I was making was that they're highly social,ity but instead they were living lives in which they

forage by forage singly and arrange if you will by calls to get back together various times during the night and sleep together in the daytime so they were actually working like we do to be social. Yeah. You have to put extra work in to say, hey, let's meet up in this treetop the same way. There's a friend I want to hang out with tonight. And I say, hey, man, you want to go to a soccer game? And he said, yeah, what time? And he's going to meet me and we're going to go together.

And I basically got tickets to the soccer game just so I could invite a friend and hang out with a friend. I'm going to like extra work just so I can be social. And that's what these animals are doing too. And crows do this too, is what you're saying. Yeah. So crows actually combine a bit of everything. The American crows, which is the ones that we primarily study, have territories. They have a recognizable area in which a small family groups, which can get large because they are also extended family groups there. They start with nuclear family, but they can be kids from previous years. They're what we call cooperative breeders. And their kids from previous years or joiners from other groups swell those ranks. So maybe on average, three, four on any given month or up to 12 or even 15 is one of our largest groups that we know of.

So they do have a territory, but they leave it and they join other crows. do have a territory, but they leave it and they join other crows. And in the winter, they travel with large groups of crows and roost with, sleep with, at night, large groups of crows. So they had this really human-like, as my colleague Kevin McGowan, who started this study in 1989 here in Ithaca, New York, he always describes them as, you know, having a very human lifestyle with a family they recognize as family. Really? But all sorts of associations outside of that. Like they have friends and they have co-workers, basically. Yeah. And they go friends and they have coworkers, basically. Yeah, and they go to the mall just to see what's stirring, right? And, you know, and they say, it's a lot safer.

I'm going to the motel tonight where I've got everybody's there and we'll all hang out together. They're really complex, interesting birds, aren't they? I mean, I'm so struck by, again, I started birdwatching in the middle of the pandemic in order to get outside and just to find a way to connect with nature a little bit more in the sort of wasteland of Los Angeles. And one of the wonderful things I find out about it is that, oh, it turns out Los Angeles isn't such a wasteland. There's nature and there's birds.

I've seen like over 100 bird species in just a year, just in my own, you know, concrete city. But you quickly learn, okay, there's crows and ravens we have here everywhere. They're all over the place. They're frankly the most common bird that you would see, you know, in some places you might see more pigeons, more rock pigeons, but like really, you know, look anywhere and you'll see crows and ravens. And so at first you're like, oh, that's kind of just like a trash bird, whatever. Those are, they're like pigeons. They're like rats. They're just like an animal of human society.

But then the more you watch them, like, okay, pigeons are kind of boring. They just kind of sit there and they go coo and they fly around. But crows are like always up to something. There's like, you start to realize like, oh, these are exceptionally smart and like really, really interesting creatures, right? They're watching you as much as you're watching them. And they are. So one of the things that has to be said right off is that most of the work we've done has been with crows living in a small city, Ithaca, New York. So we might want to call them urban or suburban. They certainly cohabit with people. And their territories contain people's

yards. I live rurally outside of Ithaca now, and we're beginning to look in a variety of ways, including genetics, at the more rural crows to answer some questions that we may talk about in a bit. Because there's been a lot of interest in animals that do what you're seeing, in your neck of the woods, adapt to living right near us. In the 1970s, you would not have had that experience. Really? Why is that? How do you mean? So American crows in particular, they're widespread across the U.S. And one of my colleagues calls them synanthropic, meaning that they've always kind of associated with people over a long time with indigenous peoples, perhaps as they may have used their refuse piles and their scavengers, their generalists. And so it wasn't that they were unused to people, but that when we build cities during the period when the white settlers are moving in, they shop them. It's a big enough bird to eat. It's a big enough bird to hate if you don't like them landing near your crops. You build a scarecrow. if you don't like them landing near your crops.

You build a scarecrow. You build a literal, we literally have this cultural memory of a person that you build to get the damn crows out of the field. Now, why don't you want the crows in the field? Are they eating your seed or something? I actually have no idea why a farmer wants to scare a crow in the first place.

Well, I sort of have some debates with people about what they're actually doing, but there's no question that when you make a garden or plant corn, whether or not they're eating the base of that corn, I don't know. But they go and they flip it out and they basically undo your sprouting corn very nicely. Very nicely. But on the flip side, in the early 1900s, this was well documented. The other thing they're doing in your fields is they're eating grubs and eating things that eat your crops. So there's this, you know, knowledgeably, you would not want to, you wouldn't want a crow undoing your planting, but you might want crows work in your fields at some point.

This is a creature that we have a deep connection with. You're making me realize that like, okay, we literally build a little homunculus of ourselves and stick it on a pole in a field, which I assume we've been doing for a very long time. That strikes me as a very old kind of folk process. European. Yeah. Yeah.

So I don't actually know the history of scarecrows. Somebody ought to write one. Yeah, I know. If you ever meet someone who knows the history of scarecrows, let me know because I want to get them on this show because that's now I'm really curious. Where did that start? Because what a strange, spooky, weird thing to do to build a mannequin and stick it on a pole. It almost seems like some kind of weird, you know, pantheistic prayer to the crow god or something to do this.

But in any case, we've got like a deep relationship with these animals. But you're saying that our relationship with them in cities has changed. Yeah. You're saying that our relationship with them in cities has changed. Yeah. So one of the other things we did for crows is not only put up scarecrows, but we've hunted them. And we've shot them with guns. And crows were very, very, very quick to learn that they shouldn't get too close to people with guns. There's lots of stories about people across the 19, 18, 1900s of walking out with a

gun and, you know, every crow goes up, not in your front yard, but one field away. Wow. So their idea of danger and people is pretty, was pretty well established. They knew that they could use people, but they didn't want to be near people with guns. But crows are not crows in Los Angeles are not that afraid of people. Now, I realize that there are guns in our cities, but people are not shooting crows, right? Yeah, no, not particularly. of the things that happened is that so throughout much of the you know as cities were growing in the 1900s um crows were not moving in that was just too close to people and in 1972 we have the migratory bird act and that basically said that crows are in it included crows, that you cannot shoot migratory birds.

And Migratory Bird Treaty Act. So this included treaties with Canada. And there's more details on that. So I'm not saying it very clearly. But in any case, what that meant is that crows stopped being shot at a lot of the time, although it certainly still allowed, if you were a farmer, you could still shoot crows, you know, if they were a nuisance. Then, as cities got large, and people in them didn't want other people shooting at each other in them or anything, you know, where they could injure another person. Guns became shooting a gun in a city is now outlawed. So crows are kind of doubly protected beginning in the 70s. And it was at that point, the 70s. And it was at that point, somewhere in the 60s and 70s, that they start being recorded as actually breeding in cities. Wow. And staying in cities. So if you think about it,

when we started, when Kevin started, my colleague, Kevin McGowan at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, when he began studying these crows in Ithaca in 1989, it was basically, what, 40 years since the crows had moved into town. They were still relative newbies. And crows can live a long time. They were like living 10, 12. We've got three crows who have lived 19 years. Wow. So we could be looking at

the grandchildren of the first crows. To be in the cities, they're literally like second generation immigrants. Yeah. That's wild. But also their behavior is changing so fast. If like you say, you'd come out, you know, 50 years ago, you'd come out with a gun and all the crows would take off.

And like I said, right now, I mean, there's I'll tell you, there's some crows sitting on the fence outside my house right now. And when I go outside, they will not move an inch. So are the crows like is there some kind of cultural memory are they telling each other to change their behavior in this way i mean like because it can't just be says too fast for natural selection to work so they must be learning like collectively how to respond to us yeah so they as you say, a really smart bird. They're a long lived bird. One of the things that we do know is that the evolution of smart learning capacitated animals is certainly a long life because it's more useful to learn if you're going to live a long time.

So, you know, that argument seems to hold up in that sense. And so, yes, they learn readily from each other. And one of the hypotheses that I certainly have not tested or can show is that crows who are, by moving between groups, you know, moving outside your family and visiting a large foraging area or whatnot, you might learn what those crows over there or some of those crows fear. So if you're a young crow and you're moving around between groups, you not only get to learn what your family fears, but you may get education on what somebody else fears. Wow. And probably for most of our crows in town, they're not breeding. They're not a member of a pair until they're three, four, five, depending on sex and depending on year. So, yes, there's a lot of opportunities for them to learn.

And being this kind of flexibly social individual, again, it's reminiscent of humans. I hate to be sort of anthropomorphic or maybe it's the other way. But the fact is that we know that research shows that young humans learn a lot from their peers, right? Yeah. They don't just spend time in their families, but they go over to the neighbors and it's like, well, my friends do it this way. Well, what you're describing is culture, right? Like that is something that you learn, not just on an individual basis, but in a sort of amorphous way by following what other people do around you that sort of gets into you. you that sort of gets into you. The same thing about, you know, when parents say, oh, I didn't teach my kid this, but as soon as they came back from school, they started, or why is my kid

associating pink with femininity? I didn't teach them that. Nobody specifically told them that. Where did it come from? They just kind of picked it up out of the, you know, gestalt of being in a group of other humans. You're telling me crows do the same thing. That's a very human, that's a quality I think of as being exclusively human, but it's like literally happening in the birds around my neighborhood. It's incredible.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And again, these are hard things to show in a sort of critical scientific way, but it's not just you, it's lots and lots of people who either dislike crows or like crows. And they have very different relationships with crows because the crows actually learn to recognize humans, which is the sad fact is I work with crows and I cannot recognize individual crows reliably, but crows can be pretty good

at recognizing individual humans. Wow. Are they ever offended? You're like, hey, what's up, Ben? And they're like, no, that's a different crow. Oh, we all look alike. You do great. Pretty, pretty rude. Yeah. So no, I actually learned that from, I don't know if you have read Jenny O'Dell's book, How to Do Nothing, but that was the one of the books that got me started birdwatching. started a relationship with a number of either crows or ravens in her neighborhood and they would come to her window and she would feed them and just had this like very intense kind of relationship of being seen and known by a crow that she thought was very interesting and wrote about very movingly in that really incredible book. Yeah, that's a real experience that people have. I want to know, I want to be friends with a crow. What is it like to have a crow know you? Well, we, because my students,

we not only study crows in terms of we, we put bands on them. I can tell you more about that in a bit. And tags, and we follow them through their lives, and we're interested in or non-food objects. And when we do that kind of work, we need to have crows that will work with us. We need to have crows that will allow us to ask them scientific questions and yet be free, right? Crows that are like, hey, Ann, what's up? What do you want to do today? Yeah. And one of the problems with crows is that, American crows at least, is that they're incredibly neophobic.

I mean, they have a reputation for being neophobic. What does neophobic mean? Scared of novelty, scared of new and unknown things that they haven't met before. And one of the things we were interested in and are continuing to be interested in is the proposition that a number of people have made, which is that animals living in cities around people, where things turn over a lot more, you leave the plastic pink pony out in your yard. There's a new building over here. There's trash, and then it goes away, and then it comes back. That animals should, in cities, either be selected to be less responsive to novelty or less put off by it,

responsive to novelty or less put off by it, or that they should somehow rapidly habituate to it. They should be the kind of... And so we've been interested in one question related to that, which is, are the personalities, if you will, or the responses to novelty by crows in cities, to novelty by crows in cities in Ithaca, different from those outside. To do these kinds of experiments, you need to get the crows to come to something. So then, and for us, it's peanuts. So peanuts, peanuts are your route to crow friendship. And it's also a lot of fun to watch them open them and deal with them how do they open them um they we give them whole peanuts that are unsalted so they're as natural as possible and they hold them with their feet and peck them open and remove the peanuts or

because crows are among those animals that hide food for later. My girlfriend does that. Yeah. Well, you know, ask her if she says caw when you aren't looking. But they'll sometimes stack all the peanuts in their mouth because they have kind of a pouch in the base of their and sort of in the base of what you might term their mouth. It's actually behind their beak. one time and they'll fly them off and stash them in places that they make in the ground like they can dig out a little bit and then they'll put more stuff on top of it very hard to find cool wait are they doing that are there like peanuts hidden around la in places that have they might well be might be but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna say'm not going to say that I could find them because I've gone to places where crows have hidden something and gone, you know, I can't see it.

You know, that's really good. So, yeah, they are typically quite put off by novel things still. And we can come back to that as a whole set of questions. But nevertheless, they will learn to use food and like food that you give them. And some people have made, you've probably heard of a number of these instances in which people have had crows coming to their yard because they continually feed them. And ours have gotten used to the fact that we feed them peanuts. We don't feed them all the time. So we do census routes where we go and we look for the crows who are living in different places just to see if they're still there and who's there. And we try to be somewhat unreliable feeders because we don't want to be like a major source of food,

but we want them not to fly away from us. We want them to be interested in being noticed. And then when you're trying to study how averse they are to new things, what do you then do? Do you, do you come out with a, like with a pink pony, like you say, and wave it at them and go, and see if the crow flies away or what? We don't, um, we don't want them to associate us with something horribly novel. No, we, we will get them to the point that, you know, we know where this family lives and we'll usually find places where they're comfortable coming down the side of the road for peanuts. a piece of novel, a plastic flower.

Yeah. Or one of the things that my students, my student, Yvette Brown, who's now got her PhD. She's down in at Kennesaw. She used a plastic flower. She used nuts, just large English walnuts, which are not native, which we don't find growing around here, and as a sort of innocuous foods type, but nevertheless novel. And then one of her most fear-eliciting objects was a pink hula hoop, not very big, sort of a sparkly pink hula hoop.

That was more than any of our crows could handle. And they never habituated. It was not that they got used to it. So that's one of the things that she found was that crows in cities are not, they're not, they have not lost fear of novelty. Wow. They're just as careful as anybody else. Huh. But they're constantly watching and observing and they're very curious. So they give themselves, I think you could say, they give themselves the time to habituate. Ah, they're just like, I don't know about that thing,

but I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep my eye on it. I'll sit on the wire for a while. Watch it from the tree. Well, and that helps that they're so, they're so intelligent that, so it, it, it's a situation in which it helps them. Like they mind the thing, but they're cautious.. So it's a situation in which it helps them. Like they mind the thing, but they're cautious. And maybe that's one of the reasons they're so successful as opposed to, I'm just going to guess that pigeons aren't very averse to new things, that they're just down to do whatever.

Maybe I have too low of an opinion of pigeons. I don't know. Maybe you love pigeons. Well, I mean, pigeons are not completely stupid, but I think you're right. Crows are real standouts when it comes to reacting to novel objects or novel events. And they notice. They notice detail.

Wow. And, you know, it works against us. We'll set up something, some sort of, we have a thing called a net launcher, which we've used here and there across the years to try to shoot a small net on blanks to try to capture them. Oh, wow. That's like some very spy gear that you have. Like I've seen that in video games. I didn't know that was something that existed in real life.

You shoot a net in order to catch the crow. They must not like that very much. No. net in order to catch the crow. They must not like that very much. No, and it's also not very successful because when you're doing it in cities, first of all, you have to use something small because otherwise it's not allowed, period. And you'll do it in somebody's backyard. But this particular setup has a central thing that shoots out the blanks, shoots pins carrying the net. And then that's tied at the base by little guy wires, by little guy cords. I don't know how many times we've gotten the crows habituated to an object that's very similar to that.

So we're going to, you know, they don't react to the basic net setup but we put in go in at four o'clock in the morning and lay the little cords and they fly in and they're all ready and they look around and somebody goes caw caw and they just they've just spotted those cords. Wow. You know, there's this great big lumpy thing that's going to shoot a net at you, but they've gotten used to that. But you lay a cord down on the lawn and cover it with leaves and somebody sees it. Amazing.

It really blows my mind that these creatures that are so smart and like watching and looking, you know, in a really specific way. i have so many more questions about them i specifically want to talk about crow roosts which sound fascinating but we got to take a quick break we'll be right back with more ann clark okay let's get back into it so tell me about crow roosts you said crows get together every uh uh every winter in these giant roosts you have a whole website crowroost.org tell me what is so fascinating about crow roosts okay so um first all, crow roosting is most obvious to us in the winter, because in the winter, crows in the northern parts migrate. And crows everywhere, even if they're not northern, are probably much more mobile from their house,

from their territory, from their central territory. There's no nest to tie them there. There's no babies in a nest to tie them there. So they're much more mobile. And for across the U.S. in winter, there tends to be less food in specific areas. So you're more likely to be searching for food. So it's not just crow roosting that they do more socially in the winter. It's also crow foraging. Where I'm living in the Northeast, they move out into fields, agricultural fields that have been first harvested. agricultural fields that have been first harvested.

And then they just keep working these fields for grubs and insects of various kinds. And they can catch voles sometimes. They actually will catch and kill some small animals like voles and shrews if they can catch them. Wow. Wow. And so even in the fall, or I should late summer, once the kids get mobile, we have tracked airbirds with radios and found that they form local roosts, small roosts. And that's just basically local families will gather in a woodlot, typically a fairly heavy woodlot, and sleep together. And that doesn't mean it's not pigeons on a wire. They're sitting around at that point in trees, spaced out, but a group of them together.

spaced out, but a group of them together. People have known that crows do this for a long, long time, you know, ever since way before. I'm sure people, as long as there have been people and crows mixing, they've known that crows make these roosts. And the thought is that one of the reasons they do it is that this is protective during the night against getting eaten by owls. Great horned owls are certainly one major crow predator that they have to be scared of. And at night, crows, like many diurnal day-living passerines, perching birds, of which they're a member, can't see well. So if an owl comes flying into your roost at night, it's really bad because it's going to not only be able to get one or two of you, but you're going to fly into trees. You could injure yourself.

I mean, it's not a thing that you want. This is terrifying. Yeah. It's the boogeyman in. That you want. This is terrifying. Yeah. It's the boogeyman in the closet. Only worse. Oh, my God. So this is now I'm understanding why owls have their reputation as a frightening bird. Yeah, I think they deserve it.

I mean, they're wonderful birds. They're amazing birds, but they are predators. Yeah. Crows are a big dinner. I didn't know that because crows are so big. Like, I wouldn't have imagined they were owl food. Great horned owls can take wild turkeys. Wow.

To give you an example. Wow. And they will often do so in the winter. So we think that crows leak up into roosts in part for protection. That doesn't mean that it doesn't also serve other functions. And these may get more important in the winter because in the winter, at least in the northern north temperate, we've got snow. And deep snow is not something that crows can forage in, which is probably one of the reasons that the Canadian and northern boundary crows move down in the winter. So that's where migration is really a big deal.

They move to areas where they can get some food. food. And where I am in New York, migration is somewhat optional, if you will, and dependent a bit on the year. So if we don't have a lot of snow, you can potentially even stay home on your territory and just make forays. But you're going to get a lot of crows who are in the farther north moving down or in the farther northeast where there's more snow moving in. And so you get areas where crows kind of collect in the winter in larger numbers because of food. Many of those guys don't have territories, right? They don't live here. They're the Florida migrants, right? And so what happens is that those guys establish sleeping sites in woodlots again.

And from following our crows with radios, we know that many of our own local crows with territories don't go home to their territories at night. They join these. So the numbers swell. This is like it's like a yearly crow convention. It's like all the crows from around the country, from around the continent are getting together. Hey, what's up? We're all getting together at the tree over there.

So leave home for a little bit and go to the convention because you're going to a hotel. It's a big hotel. It's going to be a great hotel. Yeah. And Auburn near us is one of the places they they the roosts tend to be or have are known to be the same site year after year after year. So so they remember where the like a crow from another part of the continent comes like that's the tree I always go to every winter. And I meet a whole lot of other crows there. They go back to the same spot or at least the same woods. Yeah. Yeah. there they go back to the same spot or at least the same woods yeah yeah does it serve some kind

of social purpose for them as well to like get together and are they talking are they saying hey what's up i remember you what's going on in canada i wish i wish we knew many many many more details i mean one of the things we have no idea is how much learning or how much transmission of information, because they don't, you know, we know they don't have language in the same symbolic sense that we do. But one of the things that they may be doing and are likely to be doing in an immediate sense is sharing information or using each other as sources of information about where to forage that day. So if you have a central area and everybody, you've got 50,000 crows spread out over the landscape, and they're going to come into that area in the night, They're going to come in from where they last foraged.

Presumably, and this is sort of the idea of having an information center, which people have worked with and is at least proposed as one of the things that crows and other big roost living animals are doing, things that crows and other big roost living animals are doing is that when they wake up in the morning if you left an area which was really still good to eat in you probably head out there right yeah if i didn't i'm going to sit there for a little bit and look around and join the guys who look like they really are excited about where they're going. Yeah. And so in this sense, it allows it, you know, whether they mean to trade information or not. Yeah. They can't help but give some information away about where the food is. Yeah. I mean, this is wild. It's very wild stuff. It's like the more I learn about animals like this, you know, we often have this idea that humans are very separate in the way that we operate as social animals that we have. Like,

you're like, oh, they don't have language like we do, but they communicate in this way and that way and that way and that way and that way and that way and that way and that way. It's like, oh, okay. We're really just at one end of a continuum or maybe in the middle of a continuum of ways that animals are social and communicate with each other and are intelligent. I mean, you know, dolphins get a lot of press for being a very intelligent animal, but like it really is. Crows are blowing my mind right now.

Well, and, and, you know, I'd like to turn that around too. If we all came together in the mall and there was something going on, you would not require language to figure that out. Yeah, you're right. And so I think that we often get very hung up on, oh, well, does this mean that crows are transmitting information as, you know, like in some direct linguistic way? No, they're very good at reading each other. We're very good at reading each other. We're very good at reading each other. We're very good at reading each other. We're very social species. We don't require language for a lot of real basic communication. Wow.

because I don't think any of us adequately could tell you what crow calls mean or how many there are or, you know, that is really, I think, one of the most important areas that we can work on, but it's going to take a lot of creativity. I mean, it sounds like if anyone can figure it out, it sounds like you can. Do crows like, you know, purposefully cooperate to do? Wait, don't some crows use tools? Is this a thing that I remember reading about? because most of us in the USA think that there's one crow. There's one crow and maybe one raven. Yeah. That's what most people across. There's a number of crows.

Crows and ravens are really only differentiated by size. They're all, they're the same genus. They're all the genus Corvus. So is everything that you've said so far is also true of ravens generally or? In very general terms. Yeah, okay. The social systems can get different. Mm-hmm. But they're different in ways that are probably fairly flexible.

Mm-hmm. Even if we characterize different species. Mm-hmm. we characterize different species. So I will say, first of all, that in North America, we have, in the East, we have fish crows and American crows. And fish crows, if you're down in Florida, you'll meet them and they say, uh, uh, or uh-uh, uh-uh. Fish crows up in Ithaca, which is the northern border of where they've moved to, say, eh, they don't say, uh-uh.

What do the American crows sound like? I want to hear them all now, Anne. I have to do all the crow calls. No, there's too many. But anyway, that's how people tell them apart because they are all big black birds. Yeah. And it's just really hard for us to tell them apart. I mean, I got so proud once I learned the difference between a crow and a raven. And I could tell the difference. I started telling everybody I knew, here's how I tell the difference between a crow and a raven.

And everyone, all my friends were like, I didn't even know there was a difference between a crow and a raven. I was like, no, here's how you tell the difference and i might even say this again in the intro to this episode i haven't decided yet because i'm so such a fan of it but it but tell me if i'm right is that is that ravens if you see one flying high and soaring that's a raven crows stay closer to the ground they flap a lot and is that generally correct that's in the right direction and crows have a rowing flapping. So you do notice they're flapping. They're kind of rowing, flapping motion, very even.

Ravens do tend to go higher and soar more. Yeah. They're more acrobatic in the air. American crow tails end in a soft box box in a soft rectangle yeah and raven common raven tails at least end in a wedge yeah like a like a point sort of like they come to a point at the end of a big broad wedge yeah and then and then crows crows do a caw caww, caw, caw, more like that. And then a raven is more of a, like a deep rattle, like a, like a froggy kind of croak. Yeah. Right?

I mean, that's how you would, yeah. I mean, certainly the typical, the typical thing that you might hear when they're flying. Some of it's body size. And then what's body size? Yeah. Some of it's body size. And then what's body size? Yeah.

So one of my early grad students, Doug Robinson, who's down at Mount St. Mary's near New York, he was making recordings of blue jays and crows. And if you slow the recording of a blue jay down, it sounds a lot like an American crow. Yeah. Some of the calls. And if you speed an American crow up, it sounds like a blue jay. Yeah. I was just in Michigan and it was my first time since birdwatching being around there, you know, being around so many blue jays. I'm like, these are very crow-like. They're like big ass birds that are like really being noisy and go, like, I'm like, Oh yeah, these are, well, they're corvids,

right? They're related to crows. Yep. Absolutely. Crows, Jays and magpies. Yeah. Are all in this group.

But you, but this, this came up because I asked you if they use tools. Right. So that's a quick segue into one species of crow uses tools habitually. And there are a bunch of species of crows in the world. And most

all of them are big black birds with some variations in having, is the hooded crow having a grayish body or white or gray somewhere around the head and neck and body. So the species of crow that uses tools is found on New Caledonia, New Caledonian crow.

Where's New Caledonia? It's in the Pacific. It's going to try to tell you how many miles from New Zealand it is. Got it. It's an island off of New Zealand. It's an island a good ways from New Zealand. Got it. Oh, okay. And so it's one of the island crows. They fly a lot differently than our American crows because they're not built for long distance travel. They're more in the canopy flying amongst woodlots and canopy.

But they are found on this island only. And a couple of little tiny islands surrounding it. They have no woodpeckers on that island. So there's nothing to compete for that. And being an island, it's probably never had a whole lot of different options for, you know, protein and that sort of thing. And there are great big grubs that burrow into the trees. And if we want to make at least a story reconstruction, it's that they are going after these grubs in the trees. Nobody, no other bird is going after those grubs in the trees because there are no woodpeckers to compete with. after those grubs in the trees because there are no woodpeckers to compete with. And so Christian Rutz and others in England have estimated that six of these grubs will do them for a day of good protein.

Wow. So there's a lot of selection pressure for them to be able to get those grubs. And the tools that they make are they use either specially broken little branches and twigs, or they rip the hooked edges of pandana sleeves so that they have a long strip like this with little hooks along the edge. They just nip, nip, rip very carefully. And they stick those in. And these grubs are defensive. And they raise up and grab at the hooks or at the twig that's coming down after them. Wow. And allow them to pull out.

That's incredibly intelligent to figure that out. Yeah. So, and we know that it's been going on for a long time because not only do they make those tools and they pass on, it takes them quite a long while to get really good at it. So we know that it, you know, this is not just some sort of automatic thing. This is not some kind of genetically programmed behavior. This is something that they learn from each other to some extent. Yeah. And they probably,

and they hang around with their parents and their parents apparently leave tools prominently in places that the youngsters could use them. On the flip side, it looks like they've been using it long enough that the tool use has also become so intrinsic that it has and you're trying to hold a stick or a little piece of pandanus leaf to go down into a hole. You've got to watch what you're doing. So you've got to kind of, but you want to hold it so that you could control it out the front of your bill. Yeah. out the front of your bill. Yeah. So if you have a hook over your bill, as many birds do, including our American crows and whatnot, you can't, you got to stick it out the side. Their bills are modified to be like pliers. Wow. So not have a little hook. It's just straight out the front. There's no hook. It's like a pair of straight pliers. And they can

then hold that in a way that no other crow would be able to hold it. That is so cool. So the other really cool thing, which I love, is that they are really, really drawn to tools. So you know how if you, human kids, if you put them out in the yard, they're going to go, they're going to pick up sticks and stones and they're going to throw them

and bonk them and things, right? Yeah, yeah. You don't have to tell them to do that. Yeah, yeah. Well, young New Caledonian crows, if you leave sticks around, they are inordinately attracted to them and they will try to stick them in things. Wow. OK, so there is so it is partially built into them genetically at this point, but not entirely.

They still have to learn it. It's like culture has wrapped around and more selection on the whole neural capacity of these animals but but that really sounds like the we can imagine so easily how that happened you know in this animal because it's on an island and because there's a particular food to look for and and like you say we can imagine how okay the culture wrapped around the genetics and and it became both things at once. And just you explaining that makes a really clear model of that in my head. But I'm like, oh, that must apply to humans as well in so many other ways. When you talk about, say, language is simultaneously, we have a genetic, you know, neurological capacity for language, but we also learn it and it's also flexible and X, Y, Z.

And then we have a million things like that, but it's like, oh, this is an example of how we learn too, very obviously, right? Yep, exactly. And it gets called gene culture co-evolution by some of my colleagues. And if you're a highly cultural animal, your culture modifies your environment. Wow. And selects for other attributes that we would consider more, I don't know, biological or,

or, you know, physical in some sense. So this just makes me think that like, there's lots of science fiction stories about, you know, I think a lot of people imagine humans die out. Well, maybe one day dolphins will like learn to talk and start building stuff. And I would add crows to that list of like the animal that might supplant us. I mean, there's so much going on there that is so fascinating. I think that one of the interesting questions that people have raised about animals moving into urban areas is whether those species which are most successful at doing so have those attributes. Yeah. One of the hypotheses is that animals that move readily into our living around us, surviving with us, tend to be large-brained, long-lived social learners. Like dogs?

Dogs, coyotes, even rats. Yeah. Oh, that's true. Rats are very intelligent. They're very social. Yeah. Oh, that's true. Rats are very intelligent. They're very social. Yeah. They're very social. That's wow.

I never thought of that before. Cats too, to some, I mean, cats live in big colonies. I don't want to call them large brain. I have a very poor opinion of cats, but no,

that's, I'm just kidding around, but you know, and coyotes are wonderful examples. Yeah. Yeah. They're extremely, they're extremely smart and social. Anyone who's been stalked by a coyote can absolutely feel that way.

Like, it's following me and looking at me. And watching and wondering what I'm going to do with that piece of hot dog in my hand. Wow, that's amazing. I mean, okay. How can folks, we got to wrap it up, but how can folks who are curious about this, want to learn more about crows? And also do you recommend, I'm fascinated by crows. I have a rooftop. Should I start leaving peanuts out and trying to attack, attract the crows in my neighborhood? Is this a good idea or a bad idea if I want to learn more about crows and make crow friends or will they not leave me alone ever again? I mean, from my perspective, I think that leaving peanuts out is fine.

I would not overdo it. I would want to make sure that you're attracting some crows and that you're not becoming the focus of, you know, a murder. A murder? A murder of crows? Yeah, don't forget. You get a lot of crows together. It's a murder. That's right. Um, that's what they say. Um, but cause there are, obviously you have neighbors and not everybody lives crows. And I have, oh my God, don't move in next door to this guy. He the crow man that's right that's right and I've have uh friends who've had that problem and um I have also as I walk around you know people ask me what are you looking at because I have binoculars this is Ithaca New York there's

the Cornell Lab of Ornithology here there are people interested in birds all over. And you say, oh, I'm looking at crows and their faces fall. And they go, oh, I was hoping it was a warbler of something or something like that that was coming through. But then you meet the people and they say, and I hate crows. And I remember one conversation, which kind of epitomizes all of this, in which she said, I hate crows. And we got into this little discussion and she said, I don't like them because they're so loud. They're always in groups and they're up and down the street all the time. And I finally said to her, you know, you hate crows because they're so much like people. And she looked at me and she said, yes. That is incredible. And thank you so much for joining us and blowing my mind so much with all this incredible crow information. Where,

where can folks find out more about you and your work? Well, I'm not very, I'm not as easily found as, as one would hope, but I'm certainly open to emails. Just go to the woods in the winter and there you'll be. Right. You can find my contact information at the website for Binghamton University in biological sciences. And I have lots of students who are also happy to talk about their work. And our papers are mostly kind of professional. But I have dreams of writing a big crow book in the next few years. I hope you do.

And in the meantime, you also have a website, crowroosts.org, which people can check out, right? Yes, yes. Although it's not as well kept up as it should be. Well, Anne, thank you so much for being here. I can't thank you enough. Sure thing. This has been a pleasure, Adam. And I hope your crows find you.

I hope they do, too. I want nothing more than that. Well, thank you once again to Ann Clark for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. If you did, just remember you can support this show by going to our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And buying a book by one of our incredible guests or by anybody else while you're there, we get a little referral revenue and it does help support the show. I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roudman, our engineer, Ryan Connor, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks

at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at Adam Conover or adamconover.net. And until next week, we'll see you next time on Factually. Thank you so much for listening. That was a Hate Gum podcast.