Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Thick-billed ravens (Corvus crassirostris) have no right to look as much like dinosaurs as they do
They’re also huge! Largest passerine (perching birds). They have very deep voices too, make lots of dinosaur noises (well, I suppose what I think dinosaurs would sound like)
Corvids have a basic grasp of the theory of mind - the ones who hide their food will remember who saw them bury it, and will come back to stash it elsewhere when they know they’re no longer watched. They are vaguely aware that others are also capable of thinking and planning, and anticipate that another bird would seize the treasure later, if ever given the opportunity.
Many corvids also mate for life. They have foods they prefer more than others, and it has been discovered that they can also know and remember their partner’s favourites, and bring those treats to each other, even if they personally don’t care for this food source.
Is that love? A crow cannot be forced to do something it does not want to do, they do as they please and it pleases them to bring gifts to their partners. What is love but joy that stems from the joy of another?
Do they know what love is? A jackdaw knows that another jackdaw it can see has seen it in return - do they know that a spouse that brings them treats does it as a treat to themselves as well?
Do these birds know what love is? Do they know that they love, and are loved in return?
Corvids have a basic grasp of the theory of mind - the ones who hide their food will remember who saw them bury it, and will come back to stash it elsewhere when they know they’re no longer watched. They are vaguely aware that others are also capable of thinking and planning, and anticipate that another bird would seize the treasure later, if ever given the opportunity.
Many corvids also mate for life. They have foods they prefer more than others, and it has been discovered that they can also know and remember their partner’s favourites, and bring those treats to each other, even if they personally don’t care for this food source.
Is that love? A crow cannot be forced to do something it does not want to do, they do as they please and it pleases them to bring gifts to their partners. What is love but joy that stems from the joy of another?
Do they know what love is? A jackdaw knows that another jackdaw it can see has seen it in return - do they know that a spouse that brings them treats does it as a treat to themselves as well?
Do these birds know what love is? Do they know that they love, and are loved in return?
A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.
!!! ok but that’s legitimately what it’s doing!! That’s a corvid right there (looks like a hooded crow, to be precise), which means it’s intelligent enough to recognize, a) cars are dangerous and streets should be treated with a certain degree of caution, b) this car’s slowing down for them–cars do that sometimes–which means they’re not in imminent danger, so it doesn’t have to fly away just yet, c) that hedgehog’s still gonna get killed if it doesn’t MOVE, FAST (cars can change speed very quickly and the hedgehog’s still in the way), and almost certainly also d) if the bird does nothing it gets a free lunch.
Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food.
i can’t - look if you follow me you know I have a thing for corvids, but this is - like!!! People are always saying “ah yes they have sub-human intelligence and don’t consider anything that isn’t immediately necessary for their own survival/pleasure,” but! Whether or not it can do philosophy, this crow is clearly demonstratingcompassion. Even if it’s just the kind of compassion a toddler shows to a snail, a social creature that instinctively recognizes the potential for emotion in other beings, that’s still huge and cool and important and corvids!!! are! neat!!!
Also, by the car stopping for them, that hedgehog has two other species actively working to help it stay alive for no gain of their own.
Reminds me of that professor who said the beginning of civilization was when someone took care of another. The broken thigh bone thing.
“Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others.” - Margaret Mead
I love how both corvids and parrots are in general highly intelligent, but where corvids generally have strict hierarchies, solve disagreements in the pecking order by fighting, and have a strong dislike for anything new or foreign until they figure out how to make use of it, parrots are just here to party.
The New Caledonian crow, who knows how to specifically build a tool in order to build another tool, never engages in play. These motherfuckers are smarter than some people with the right to vote, and they are Extremely Serious Birds. They don’t have time to play, they got work to do and kids to raise.
And then there’s the kea, straight-up titled “clown of the mountains”, that has a specific vocalization for “playtime!”. Scientists decided to try what happens if they play the Play Call for two fully-grown adult keas that are together in an area and can clearly see there is no other, third kea to make the call, and they just go “great idea, disembodied voice! it’s TIME TO FUCKING PARTY!” and start wrestling.
Imagine working really hard in order to make it into a top university to study astrophysics, making it to your first Very Serious Class, sitting down full of serious determination, and the dude next to you is taking notes without using his hands, with a glitter pen he’s shoved up his nose. And his notes are good.
It’s your first day of Bird University and you already fucking hate this guy.
So there’s this gene in humans called PLXNC1 or “Plexin”, right? So Plexin is associated with increased neuron function and is generally thought to be correlated to human’s increased cognitive ability for the use of language, i.e., “language learning”. Super cool, right?
Humans aren’t the only animals with advanced language learning that have Plexin in their genome. We can actually find homologous plexin between humans and PARROTS!
Using genomic alignment search tools, we can actually break down the sequence of human Plexin and directly compare it to the Plexin found in parrots. (This was actually a project I ran for an upper division genomics class, and running the program literally takes like… ten minutes.) I wanted to see how similar the plexin gene was between humans and parrots, so I queued up the human sequence against all of the available records from parrot genomes and sorted by greatest percent identity (i.e., which bird species had the closest plexin to ours?)
THIS LITTLE ASSHOLE HAS A HOMOLOGOUS LANGUAGE LEARNING GENE WITH US!!!! A GENE THAT IS THOUGHT TO BE CORRELATED TO HIGHER LEVEL LEARNING AND INTELLIGENCE!!!!! AND THEY USE THEIR INTELLIGENCE TO WREAK HAVOC ON TOURISTS
Also these guys have been found to literally have predictive reasoning skills, which we consider REALLY FUCKING ADVANCED for a lot of animal species. They pass the Aesop’s fable test with flying colors. They’re so goddamn cool, I love them so much.
The kea really said: “I will use my superior intelligence to have a good fucking time” and that’s so powerful honestly
The thing about translating is that sometimes words just. Don’t have translation, or they have shitty translation. For example, yerbabuena and menta are two different types of plants, but both of them get translated to mint in English
Raven and crow, on the other hand, are two different types of birds, and yet they both get translated to cuervo in Spanish
Now, as y'all may or may not kmow, a group of crows gets called a murder, and a group of ravens is a conspiracy (to say murder of crows or conspiracy of ravens is somewhat redundant if you think about it btw)
So. They get the same name in spanish, right? So a group of cuervos… How does that get called?
