American crows are some really brainy birds.
The American crow should borrow a line from the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield: “I don’t get no respect.”
The black, burly bird with a stout beak barely draws attention, except for its raucous, raspy “caw-caw-caw” call. It annoys people rather than charming them.
Farmers tried to ward off crows by building scarecrows, decked out like a farmer, with overalls and a straw hat, and stuck in a farm field. But crows could tell a farmer from a stick figure.
Farmers tried shooting crows with a rifle. But crows calculated how far a rifle shot traveled and stayed a safe distance away.
Crows also remembered the faces of gun-toting farmers and avoided them. Or anyone else with a gun. As a young boy on my grandfather’s farm, I tried to shoot crows with my handmade slingshot. Crows ignored me.
Little did I understand the exceptional intelligence of crows.
Relative to body size, a crow has the same size brain as a monkey. Advanced brain imaging techniques recently showed that a crow’s brain has a neocortex similar to that of monkeys, although the crow’s neocortex has a different shape.
As part of the brain’s cerebral cortex, the neocortex provides such high-level functions as consciousness, problem solving, perception and language. Crows seem to demonstrate all those mental abilities.
For example, crows will drop nuts on a roadway and wait for cars to crush them. If nuts are dropped near an intersection with a traffic light, crows will wait for the light to turn red before flying down to retrieve the cracked nuts.
We’ve known that crows use sticks to dig for grubs. But they can engineer specialized tools using interconnected sticks with wires and other items to retrieve food.
Crows will delay eating food if they know they’ll get better food later, too.
Being highly social birds, crows communicate in a complex language of caws, coos, clicks and other sounds. They also imitate human voices.
Although crows can’t compose a Willie Nelson song or write a Shakespeare play, they should at least get our respect for being brainy.
Gary Clark is the author of “Book of Texas Birds,” with photography by Kathy Adams Clark (Texas A&M University Press). Email: Texasbirder@comcast.net.