JennTalksNature

We were the research group that the TED speaker in that video worked with. I can tell you a couple things about that talk in particular. 1. The photos used are mine, and are uncredited. 2. The photos are not of a functional machine. The box was placed at a composting facility that our research birds frequent and is non-functioning (i.e. the components of the machine are not on or even in the machine, it's just a shell in the photos). We placed cheezits on the box to get birds to land on it simply to see if they could land on the box based on it's current design, as requested by the TED speaker. The photos were not taken by me to fool anyone, but I certainly feel like they were used to that effect :/ 3. Although the talk doesn't explicitly say it, it sure implies that the box had been tested on wild birds, it had not. Only stood on by crows interested in cheezits.

The machine was never successfully used by the wild crows. They were always too afraid to get near it and when the mechanics were on, forget it, they wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Our wild crows never dealt with it and the box itself certainly never, ever saw our captive zoo crows (as implied in later articles). We ended up parting ways with the TED speaker because we felt that he was jumping the gun on the results, and the multiple media articles with false claims really put us off. That's not how science works. In our realm you need the results before you say something works or generate hype, apparently in the technology realm you build hype before you get any results.

Could it have worked on wild crows? Probably not. The box itself was off-putting to a crow, an animal that is very neophobic (scared of new things). Also, why would a wild crow care? They have so much other, delicious food items readily available all around them to forage for, so there's really no incentive for them to learn or bother with the machine.

ANYHOW, as far as the extent of crow intelligence and memory, they are quite extraordinary. Here's one of many articles on crow intelligence: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/crow-intelligence-mind_n_2457181.html

As far as tool use goes, the New Caledonian crow is all over the internet with their tool using abilities (ex. here's Betty making tool spontaneously and awesomely http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtmLVP0HvDg). New Caledonian crows are a completely different species than the American crow, fish crow, common raven, carrion crow, hooded crow, etc. and are specialized tool users. We do not see this kind of impressive tool use in any other species of crow. Check these birds out, they are SO FREAKING cool: http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/en/about/our-research/research-groups/new-caledonian-crow-cognition-and-culture-research.html

Here are a few. Looking back on it, it doesn't surprise me, but at the time, I was shocked.

1. We were doing an experiment looking at facial recognition. Marzluff's research is about crows remembering a "bad" person, so we were wondering if they might recognize "good" people (i.e. who feed them peanuts). They definitely recognized our faces, which didn't shock us, but what did is that they learned "safe" /behavior/. Once we started sending new people out (different faces) that did the same behaviors as us, they stopped caring who the face was and only cared that the person "acted" like us.

2. I was trying to get crows to feed from a puzzle box and they were scared of it. One snowy day I loaded it up with peanuts and was sure they'd come down to the delicious food. A bunch of squirrels were interested and started eating from the puzzle box. I hoped that the crows would infer from the squirrels that the puzzle box was not, in fact, a terrifying deadly crow trap. Instead, what they did was wait for the squirrels to take the peanuts away, cache (hide them) in the snow, and go back to the box. The crows then RAIDED THE SQUIRREL CACHES and got all the peanuts they wanted without ever going near my puzzle box :| I was simultaneously impressed and pissed off, haha.

Well, for our protocol it was walking toward them with eye contact (something they hate, but if they like you, will tolerate), throwing the peanuts out, then walking away and looking back. Sounds silly, but it was the protocol, and sure enough, if people followed the protocol the crows responded to them positively.

Also, I support that last sentence.