Complex Numbers

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy...

It's fairly well known that corvids are hardly birdbrains, but this recent article from SciAm delves into further evidence, while also punning on one of my favorite bands.

    Crows Rival Human Toddlers in Counting Skills  
Counting crows proclaim “caw, caw, caw, caw” when staring at the number four

The rock group Counting Crows were onto something when they chose their band name. Crows can indeed count, according to research published this week in Science.

That's not why they picked the name, but by Waltz's Law, never let facts get in the way of a good joke. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one.

But, you know, that's just, like, a pinion, man.

Okay, okay, puns out of the way for now, there's some interesting stuff here.

The results show that crows have counting capacities near those of human toddlers who are beginning to develop a knack for numbers, says lead study author Diana Liao, a postdoctoral researcher in neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

So, no, they're not about to take over the world or build rockets to Mars.

“We think this is the first time this has been shown for any animal species,” she adds.

I know there's been research done in this area, but I can't be arsed to search for examples countering what the researcher says here. Yes, there have been claims that horses, e.g., can count, but those usually turned out to be hoaxes or misunderstandings.

They presented the birds with randomly ordered cues, four of which were visual—colored Arabic numbers that appeared on a touch screen—and four of which were auditory, including a short guitar chord and a drumroll.

Please, please tell me they sampled the latter from Counting Crows albums. Well, in my headcanon, they absolutely did.

Onur Güntürkün, a biopsychologist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, who was not involved in the research, says the new paper is “excellent”—even if the findings are “not unexpected” given all that scientists already know about crows and many other species’ intelligence.

Like I said: we know they're smart. They also apparently have a long memory. There are plenty of stories about people who pissed crows off, only to find themselves harassed by black-winged birds for the rest of their lives, indicating that not only does the pissed-off crow take revenge, but gets all their corvid buddies and offspring to punish the offender. People associate elephants with never forgetting, but elephants ain't got nothin' on crows.

On the flip side, do something nice for a crow, and they could become your army of darkness. I've thought about doing this by leaving shiny things out for them to collect, but I'm entirely too lazy, and what would I do with bird minions, anyway? Get them to attack surveillance drones? No, they might get hurt. Besides, my cats might get jealous.

Obviously, I can't leave this entry without an appropriate video:

If you think you need to go
If you wanted to be free
There's one thing you need to know
And that's that you can't count on me