Twitter Thread: Ravens Are The Coolest Birds

Saturday, June 20, 2020

Twitter Thread: Ravens Are The Coolest Birds

We love a good educational Twitter thread, and this one does a wonderful job at shining light on all the things that make ravens so dang cool. Pretty sure ravens might be the coolest bird of them all. Just saying.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch It's Sunday, let's learn some fun stuff. Here are 10 things you should know about ravens:

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch 1. Common ravens (Corvus corax) are the largest songbirds in the world. For a time people thought it was the thick- billed raven (Corvus crassirostris) but common ravens beat them out by a small margin.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch 2. Ravens are one of a small number of animals that show strong evidence of theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others. Basically consciousness and empathy. A great exp on this showed they can imagine unseen competitors.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch In a nutshell, the study showed that if ravens were given experience looking through a peephole, they could imagine that other birds might looking at /them/ through a peephole, even though they couldn't see the other bird.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch 3. Like dogs and primates, hand raised ravens can track human gaze, even around objects! Peculiarly though, they don't use human gaze to locate food.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch So for example, if you had two overturned cups and one was hiding food and you stared at that one, they don't choose to explore that cup more often then by chance. So why do they track our gaze?! We don't know yet know. Long term world domination plans maybe.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch 4. Ravens live in very complex social groups where it pays to be high on the ladder. To prevent future rivals, some evidence suggests that socially bonded ravens will break up bonding attempts between budding alliances. Basically a divide and rule strategy

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch 5. Like parrots, ravens are life-long vocal learners, meaning they can learn new sounds, including human speech, at any point in their lives. By constrast many songbirds have a small window when they're young to learn all the songs they'll ever sing.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch So could a raven come gently rapping at your chamber door quothing loudly “nevermore"? Heck. Yes. (But like parrots they really only pick up human speech in captivity)

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch 6. Ravens don't lead wolves to carcasses. Ravens follow wolves to kill sites and steal their food. It really pisses wolves off and they kill ravens when possible. In fact wolf pack size may be determined by theft pressure from ravens.

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Text - Kaeli Swift, PhD Follow @corvidresearch 7. Ravens do their own version of the screaming goat. These yells are the begging calls of young ravens. Unlike American crows, these youngsters will be kicked off the territory as soon as they reach independence and are not welcome back.

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8. Ravens love to play, especially in the snow. They make snow balls and go sledding. They play at other times of the year too. Some of their other “hobbies” include using bark to windsurf. pic.twitter.com/f1yfQK0Oaz
— Kaeli Swift, Ph.D. (@corvidresearch) April 7, 2019