Smart crow opens pizza box

41 thoughts on “Smart crow opens pizza box”

1. I regularly witness one crow holding up a local dumpster lid while its cohorts file in/out extracting goodies.

   1. Wait. A dumpster lid?

      1. Plastic lid split in two. I’m not sure if two or more crows initially lift the one half up, but definitely one holds it up as the others freight train the goods…

         1. Which shows *social* intelligence of a sort, too! Yikes!

   2. They can open up our plastic lid (~2’x2′) for the county supplied trashcan, but the ones we have are enormous.

   3. Crows in my parents’ neighbourhood know how to pick up chip bags & empty them. They seagulls never figure that out.

      1. This seagull has it down!

         1. Love it!! That’s one smart cookie.

2. Can anyone see the video??

   1. Never mind; the video finally opened. Hard to imagine a crow having the strength to open a dumpster!

      1. Plastic lid 🙂

3. Thanks for posting this! I love crows!

4. Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
   More evidence of bird intelligence

5. Brown grass! In Vancouver! We’re doomed!

   1. Yeah I noticed that right away! I can’t believe how dry Vancouver is!!

      1. Read em and weep… it ain’t looking good right now.

6. Did I see that right? Did the crow fly off with the bread and leave the meat? I’d have expected it to prefer the meat….

   b&

   1. The pepperoni may have been too spicy for his taste.

      1. Birds generally don’t mind peppery stuff at all.

      2. Curious. Baihu actually likes spicy, including some locally made very hot and very good Vietnamese jerky. And I remember from somewhere that birds don’t have capsaicin taste receptors, as part of the evolutionary development of the plant — it “wants” to be eaten by birds to spread the seeds farther.

         b&

   2. The crow has standards, you know! 😉

      1. Standards, yes…but what kind? I mean, it is eating pizza from a cardboard box. I bet it drinks its wine that way, too….

         b&

         1. Yes but of course it would reach the one by placing several stones in the glass.

7. I was watching The Birds last week. If you recall, there was an ornithologist in the diner who dismissed everyone’s paranoia, pointing out that crows couldn’t possibly have the intelligence… I thought, I guess they didn’t know in 1963.

8. Ha, cute, but the YT notes say “Filmed” on a smartphone. Really? We need some new words. Also, I still “dial” phone numbers, even on my smartphone.

   1. Do you still have to “hang up” when the call is over?

      1. Only if I have issues….

         b&

      2. Not unless I’m feeling really nostalgic.

      3. But “hang up” was already a reference to an older technology, viz. candlestick phones with a cradle where you really did hang up the ear piece.

         /@

         1. I still hang up my phone. (I even had to track down this phone on e-bay just for that distinctly retro pleasure). http://www.telephonetribute.com/images/183spacemaker.gif

         2. Yes, we never even switched to ‘setting down.’

            But it’s not at all surprising. We still “ship” by air.

9. For a few seconds I was afraid the box was going to be empty–after all that work!

   1. Actually it was nearly empty. You might think they would at least leave the guy a slice…

      1. I feel like someone should reward the crow by ordering a fresh pizza just for her/him (or at least filling a pizza box with birdseed or something) and leaving it in the same spot.

10. I once watched a crow try to crack a large nut with its beak. No go. So the bird dropped the nut in the middle of a street and waited. Soon a passing car crushed the nut, allowing the crow to pick out the edible bits.

11. Crows are probably the smartest of all the birds

12. Wait…”figured out” or stumbled on the solution?

    1. It solved the problem by trial and error so you are right that it did not work out the step logically from first principles. Still pretty impressive though.
       I believe that biologists at Oxford University recorded a New Caledonian Crow, Corvus moneduloides, making a hook from a piece of wire to retrieve a food treat from a deep narrow container. That definitely seems to have involved ‘figuring out’ a solution using novel materials that it would not come across in the wild. I think there were various other examples of the bird fashioning ‘tools’ to get at otherwise inaccessible food items and even using different tools in sequence to solve complex problems.
       New Caledonian Crows may be top of the class but it does seem that the crow family includes many rather bright members. I remember seeing a nice clip of rooks, Corvus frugilegus, getting food from trash bins in a public car park by pulling up the plastic lining sack. They had to do this in several pulls and after each pull with the beak used their feet to stop the bag from slipping back again – a sort of avian ratchet system!

       1. Crow bending wire to retrieve food.

          Another smart crow.

          Smart crow solves eight stage puzzle.

       2. There have been tests where a crows succesfully solved, on the first try, a challenge that takes 7 distinct steps in order to get a piece of food. The crow had previously solved each step individually in other challenges, but had to use them all, and in a particular order, in this 7 step challenge.

          In another study a crow, without priming, figured out how to get a piece of food that was out of reach floating on water in a narrow container by dropping stones into the container until the water rose enough to bring the food into reach.

          The most impressive part, though, is when the test was redone substituting sand for the water, i.e. displacement would no longer work, the crow examined the situation and then did not drop any stones into the container.

13. May have got there by trial and error, but I’m willing to bet next time it comes across a closed Pizza Box it will have it open a lot quicker. Smart Birds.

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