From Science Daily:
Scientists have long suspected that corvids — the family of birds including ravens, crows and magpies — are highly intelligent. Now, Tübingen neurobiologists Lena Veit und Professor Andreas Nieder have demonstrated how the brains of crows produce intelligent behavior when the birds have to make strategic decisions. Their results are published in the latest edition of Nature Communications.
Eat crow if you think I’m a bird-brain.
Crows are often forgotten when listing intelligent animals, but they’re surprisingly smart, showing that absolute brain size doesn’t matter that much. The intelligence of crows, octopuses, dolphins, whales, and elephants, makes me sometimes ponder how lucky us primates were to be on the evolutionary tree with the anatomy necessary for manipulating our environment, allowing us to eventually evolve into our civilization building selves.
Related articles
- Why Crows Are So Intelligent (news.softpedia.com)
- Neurobiologists investigate neuronal basis of crows’ intelligence (phys.org)
- Ravens and Crows: Geniuses of the Bird World (thebufflehead.org)
- First Crow, First Raven, First Human…the Way it Might’ve Been (authormarycsimmons.com)
- These 6 birds are simply amazing (futurity.org)
SelfAwarePatterns 
I see them in an entirely new light after watching:
‘crow using a tool'(should read ‘crow creating/modifying and using a tool’)
http://goo.gl/dtbHXY
‘Nature: A Murder of Crows’
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/full-episode/5977/
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Cool videos. Thanks! I’m going to have to set aside time to watch the whole Nature one. It looks fascinating. (And just a little creepy from the first couple of minutes of it 🙂 )
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You might really enjoy _The Gifts of the Crow_ by John Marzluff–also behind the PBS Nature ep “Murder of Crows”
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Thanks Mary.
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Da nada! It’s a great book–It seemed like the non-fiction version of my scifi book-Corvus Rising-
It confirmed a thought I’ve been having for the past few years–that we have largely misunderstood ALL the animals (and plants) They’re all more aware, more intelligent, more emotional than we humans have ever noticed.
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Your book looks interesting! Just read the excerpt on your blog:
http://authormarycsimmons.com/2013/11/18/excerpt-from-corvus-rising/
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Mary, do you know about John Scalzi’s holiday shopping guide posts? If not, you might want to take the opportunity on the non-traditional publishing day.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/12/01/whatever-holiday-shopping-guide-2013-starts-tomorrow/
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