When birds get too smart

Professor Ed Wasserman teaches experimental psychology at the University of Iowa and he designed an experiment using shapes on cards to test the intelligence of crows.

“So for instance, if you had two similar sized squares in the center card and to the left and to the right you had cards that had similar-sized triangles or different sized triangles, the crows would choose the cards that had the similar sized triangles, even though there’s no identical center card and either of the side cards,” explained Wasserman.

What’s really scary is the crows got it right even though Wasserman never specifically trained them for this type of mental exercise.

“They had been trained to see a single item, like a square and choose the square over the circle. Or choose the circle over the triangle,” he said. “So the crows were able to transfer a simple concept of identity to identical relations.”

Did these results surprise the professor? “When I first heard about this I was gobsmacked.”

You add all this to the well-known ability of crows to recognize human faces, hold grudges and dive bomb you when you trespass on their part of the sidewalk, and it starts to get scary.

What I think is going on is that too many researchers are giving crows these intelligence tests … and the crows are catching on.

I think I saw one pecking on a smart phone the other day. Probably ordering rancid French fries.