Wednesday September 20, 2006
More than a birdbrain
I had a conversation with a crow earlier this year.
I had been taking the dog for her morning walk. A crow in a tree overhead starting giving us a lecture – that monotonous and repetitious cawing.
I stopped, and started talking to the crow.
The cawing stopped. The crow began making different noises. They certainly weren\’t speech, in any form that I could understand. But the range of tones, the variety of inflections, the apparently deliberate articulation of non-standard sounds, suggested that this crow was genuinely trying to communicate something.
Most of the sounds were what linguistics experts would call vowels, rather than consonants – although there were a few plosives and fricatives too. They were mostly the broader vowels – somewhere between “ah” and “aw,” with no “ee” or “oo” sounds.
Perhaps it was just mimicking me. That\’s always possible. But even that\’s a sign of intelligence. Our human infants start by imitating what must to them be meaningless sounds. And we consider that a sign of budding intelligence.
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I am personally becoming more and more impressed by the intelligence of birds in general. At the very least, they can work in three dimensions far beyond human capacity. No human being, from astronaut to helicopter pilot, could drop a plane right onto a runway that was thrashing back and forth like a snake that had just swallowed a jalapeno pepper. Every bird can, when it lands on a twig tossed by a gusty wind.
I am particularly impressed by the corvid family, which includes ravens, crows, and magpies.
Humorist Lorne Elliott describes hearing what sounded like a convention of feathered creatures on the other side of a hedge – every conceivable kind of squawk, tweet and whistle. He peered through, and found a single magpie, amusing itself.
A crow named Betty is the only non-human creature known to have invented a tool. Chimps occasionally use twigs and blades of grass to reach deeper into termite mounds. Beavers use logs and sticks to build dams. But none of them reshape their raw materials for improved effectiveness. Betty (documented by Oxford University\’s Behavioral Ecology Research Group) deliberately bent a piece of soft wire into a hook, for fishing grubs out of a tube. She even adjusted the size and shape of the hook so that it would work better!
It was not a fluke. She did it repeatedly.
And Alex – a 30-year-old African grey parrot – understands the phonetic sounds associated with letters of the alphabet, and can put those sounds together into words. Alex has a vocabulary of over 100 words, and is able to ask questions. He even understands the concept of zero.
Alec has apparently reached the intelligence of a human five-year-old.
I suspect that crows are too smart to submit to intelligence tests.
As I walked on, the crow let go with a final “Cawww! Caaawwww!” and flapped off.
I had no difficulty understanding that last message: “Goodbye and good riddance, earthbound dummy!”
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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