> Also, every year, the zoo staff try to weigh the birds by baiting a weighing scale with fruit—and the crows would often foil them by just raking the fruit off with a stick.
This sounds like evidence of a playful sense of humor, unless there was a different reason the crows didn't want to get on the scale!
They say tool use is a sign of intelligence, but it is probably more accurate (and intriguing) to say it is a sign of a higher level of consciousness. Using a tool means you are not just running on pure instinct, reacting to the environment. The crows see those inaccessible grubs and think "Cant get that food. But I can use this stick to poke them!"
I am fascinated by crows and have begun carrying a ziploc bag of peanuts around in my car in case I stumble across any. They are extremely wary birds (unlike seagulls), so you have to be very subtle in how you feed them. At first I would just throw the peanuts in their direction, which scared them. This can be really bad if you do it with crows near your house because they remember faces and share that knowledge with others, so one incident can make you a "bad person" for a long time!
> They are extremely wary birds (unlike seagulls), so you have to be very subtle in how you feed them.
They also know where you looking at, and they don't like to be inspected too hard. It passed a month before the crows near my house would get near the food I left with me still present.
Nowadays they fly by at centimeters of my head and stay within meters for hours. Keep it up, is very rewarding.
I concur. I have had ravens & have currently grackles on my property. They are smart & playful once your presence is tolerated. Harris Hawks are also fascinating & tolerant if you get to know them young.
> it is probably more accurate (and intriguing) to say it is a sign of a higher level of consciousness
More intriguing certainly, more accurate is debatable. Robots can be (and have been) programmed to use tools. That doesn't mean they are conscious. Ants are very sophisticated farmers [1], but they almost certainly are not conscious.
> Robots can be (and have been) programmed to use tools.
If the crows had been programmed to do likewise rather than generating the plan themselves then I'd agree with you. Contrariwise, if the robots had just been left with an item just out of reach, a directive to grasp the item, and a stick left lying in reach, and had come up with a plan to use the stick as an arm extension on their own then that would be a different matter.
That depends on what you mean by "individual consciousness." Unitarity seems to be one of the inherent characteristics of human consciousness, which is the only unambiguous example of consciousness that we have. Humans can only consciously attend to one thing at a time. We don't know whether this is a necessary feature of consciousness or merely a human limitation (because we only have one data point), but my money is on the former.
This is not to say that consciousness could not exist in a physically distributed system like an ant colony, but the colony would still perceive itself as "an individual" (whatever that could possibly mean in that case).
Consciousness as commonly defined is kind of a low bar, companies for example could be said to be conscious and meet most definitions that doin't boil down to is Human. But, frankly we already have a word for 'Human' so defining such things in purely human terms seems pointless.
I think this kind of tool use is just evolutionarily developed instinctive behavior. It's not much of an extension of the nearly universal bird behavior of gathering sticks to build a nest. A spider weaves an amazingly symetrical, evenly spaced orb web. That takes a lot of manual dexterity, awareness of distances, where good anchor points are, etc. But a spider has no intelligence.
We do things because they please us, and avoid things because they displease us. That pleasure and displeasure is the expression of our intrinsic nature. Is it possible that instinctive behaviors in animals, rather than being robotic motions, are the result of a similar pleasure drive? Is it possible that the spider has an aesthetic sensibility with regard to web building, much like we have with art?
Throw away from you and them, at about 90°. stand so arm movement is obstructed by your body. don't expect much first couple times. they'll get what you threw after you're gone and make a connection.
I used to sit out back and feed the squirrels, and a couple of blue jays learned what I was doing by observation. Although they never got as close as the squirrels (which were almost hand-tame within a few weeks), they did warm up quite a bit and didn't even freak out when their babies were hopping around right next to me. Maybe the same proxy method would work with crows if there are any willing squirrels in the neighborhood.
Haha, I always fed the local squirrels as a kid. I tried petting one once. The little bastard went into a chattering rage and chased me down the street. To the amusement of several neighbors.
> This sounds like evidence of a playful sense of humor, unless there was a different reason the crows didn't want to get on the scale!
I'd say it's about the scale. If it had a smooth metal/plastic surface the crow might not want to stand on it, or be put off by the reflection or something along those lines.
This sounds like evidence of a playful sense of humor, unless there was a different reason the crows didn't want to get on the scale!
They say tool use is a sign of intelligence, but it is probably more accurate (and intriguing) to say it is a sign of a higher level of consciousness. Using a tool means you are not just running on pure instinct, reacting to the environment. The crows see those inaccessible grubs and think "Cant get that food. But I can use this stick to poke them!"
I am fascinated by crows and have begun carrying a ziploc bag of peanuts around in my car in case I stumble across any. They are extremely wary birds (unlike seagulls), so you have to be very subtle in how you feed them. At first I would just throw the peanuts in their direction, which scared them. This can be really bad if you do it with crows near your house because they remember faces and share that knowledge with others, so one incident can make you a "bad person" for a long time!