I’ve always been amused by the rowdy wise-guy behavior of crows, and I greatly enjoyed David Quammen’s essay explaining bad-boy crows as classic cases of bright under-achievers who get into trouble because they’re bored. (The essay is called “Has success spoiled the crow?” and it’s in Quammen’s book Natural Acts.) This article from Spiegel Online describes some of the signs of intelligence exhibited by ravens, another and perhaps even brighter corvid.
I was particularly interested in the explanation for why ravens are so smart. Evidently blind instinct, which works so well for some other animals, would not do a raven much good, because it needs to be flexible in adapting to a variety of scavenging situations. They need to outwit the carnivores whose prey they appropriate for themselves (and who could eat them without much hesitation), and they need to outwit each other in hiding their stash of meat. Thus there is good reason for them to have developed the ability to understand what another animal is thinking. The article also describes some lab experiments that tested ravens’ problem-solving ability; the ravens did quite well. The next question to be addressed is how broadly they can apply their skills—i.e., whether they can use their intelligence outside of the context of getting and keeping food.
