Sure, there’s a lot of junk on it. But then there’s really handy articles, like this one: How to Befriend Crows and Turn Them Against Your Enemies. Although for legal purposes I should note that I do not endorse the second half of that article title.
Via Facebook.
I bought a bag of ’em to feed to ravens, but I’m told that I should have gotten the unsalted kind. Apparently, this is bad for birds, because of too much salt or something like that. Personally, I am dubious, but I am also not any sort of naturalist; I just wanted to have some corvids over in the morning while I’m having my coffee.
Anyway: aside from eating two pounds of salted peanuts over the course of the next couple of weeks, is there anything else I could be doing to the blessed things?
Or ravens. Or whatever they are around here, in fact. I am told by this article that crows and ravens react well to peanuts, still in the shell; and I’m gonna test that.
Why? Because corvids are cool, that’s why. And very smart, so it’d neat to have some hang out while I’m having my morning coffee. Crows are perfectly capable of getting along with humans, and they’re not going to be eating any of my crops, so there’s no reason not to be neighborly. And yes, I imagine that I’m over-romanticizing this, but it’s a free country, what-what?
Jake Tapper over on Twitter was raving about this “typically awesome Robert Krulwich story” (no embed, sorry) over on NPR, so I checked it out – and darned if it isn’t pretty awesome. It’s a nice little popularization of some research on why crows can recognize humans when humans can’t recognize crows – and before you ask what’s the point of research like that, I should note that there’s a bunch of roboticists out there who’d love to hear how the trick’s done, starting with my wife. Nice illustrations, in a non-glitzy sort of way.
There’s also this quiz on crow-identification, which is embarrassingly difficult.
Moe Lane
PS: And thank God, but the remake of The Birds
seems to have stalled. I mention this merely because I got there in my head after musing that the term for a group of crows was a murder.
Good short story
