Disguise yourself to fool our avian overlords

I wrote previously about an interesting experiment with a NYU researcher who taught crows (through Skinnerian behavioral modeling) to drop coins into a vending machine for peanuts.

Find below a video of him describing the intelligence of crows in greater detail.

Paraphrased from below:

At the University of Washington they were doing some experiments a few years ago where they were catching some crows on campus. Some students went out and netted some crows, brought them in, weighed them and measured them and let them back out again.

And, they were entertained to discover that, for the rest of the week, whenever these particular students walked around campus, these crows would caw at them, and run around them and generally work to make their life miserable.

They were significantly less entertained when this went on for the next week after that... and the next month... and after summer break... until they finally graduated and left campus and when they came back sometime later, they found that the crows still remembered them.

So, the moral of the story being don't piss off crows. Now, students at UW who are studying crows do so with a giant wig and a big mask.

Really amazing description of their adaptive behavior at the 5:00 mark.