I used to have long conversations with the crows in the back yard at my old house. If you feed them they will trust you a little more than normal, such that when you caw at them they will caw back. They are happy to repeat the number of caws. So if you caw 5 times, they’ll caw back 5 times. Also sometimes I let them go first and I copy them. We did this for sometimes ten minutes straight.

I find it funny that observations of the cognitive capabilities of animals like in the featured article always induce people to come up with convoluted alternative ways to word the "anthropomorphic" descriptions of the behavior. "Oh that crow isn't counting, it's just basic pattern recognition associating specific quantities with specific sounds", "oh that octopus isn't playing, it's just throwing the bottle around as a stress response to boredom", etc. I get wanting to be careful not to misinterpret the behavior of specices which have evolved different social structures (if any) and under different selective pressures, but sometimes the simplest explanation really is that the animal is doing a "human behavior".

I wonder why the quotes around "count" are required.

> The crows flexibly produced between one and four vocalizations for corresponding cues associated with numerical values. Furthermore, they used different calls for different numbers.

Is this because the crows might just remember four separate stimuli, and did not demonstrate an understanding of integers in the Peano arithmetics style? I still think that producing a specific number of vocalizations, well, counts as counting.

Crows (and other birds, like parrots) are pretty smart.

There’s a school of thought/fantasy that the dinosaurs actually had an advanced theropod civilization.

Cool idea. Not sure I buy it, but they might have been quite intelligent.

I used to like seeing the Japanese crows, in Tokyo. I’ve heard they can be real pests.

They are big. Like, raven-sized.

Only tangentially related yet quick obligatory shoutout to Cornell Lab's stellar Merlin app if you are interested in deep diving into birds / their communication in general.

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

Of course crows are base-4. A crow doesn't have hands. So if they stand on one foot they have four digits on their other foot for counting. If we had only four digits at the ends of each arm we would be base-8 rather than 10.

Corvidae are very intelligent, and can readily recognize individual people.

Over the winter we tossed out a few peanuts while wearing the same baseball cap, and whistling a specific song. After awhile, the crows changed their dialogues when we walked in the area, and indeed they certainly can communicate with each-other about their environment.

We found this rather surprising, and gained a deeper appreciation for their antics. As a consequence, the birds often indicate when someone/something new is in the area.

Fascinating little creatures, =)

Crows are intelligent, There are some videos out there showing crows playing simple games and stuff...

I wonder if crows being intelligent has it linked with them being ominous in many litrature

It's interesting (and cool) how Science has one of their editors write a summary for papers

there was this crow in front of the house every morning, training its cawing, I tried to imprint some HarrHo to get it to say hallo, but it just looked like it became self-conscious and flew away, cawing in the distance

There are some Common Myna [1] that live on my land, related to crows in level of intelligence. I have observed them seemingly playing games with betelnut. They pick them, bring them to the top of the roof, release, watch it roll down into the gutter and drain spout, then retrieve it and do it again.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_myna

Five is right out.