The kindness of crows (Image: Duncan Usher/Minden Pictures/FLPA)

Recent reports of crows bestowing oddly touching gifts on people who feed them suggest that there is something rather special about these big-brained, beady-eyed birds. It seems the term “bird brain” may not be synonymous with stupidity after all.

Some find this avian intelligence disturbing. Members of the crow family – which includes ravens, jays and magpies – generally get a bad press for their trickery and thievery. They steal eggs and eat chicks and are thought to be a nuisance to farmers. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 movie The Birds didn’t help their image either.

Yet, increasingly, we find evidence of how these birds have become entwined in our social lives – an integral part of our humanity, as wildlife scientist John Marzluff and artist Tony Angell argued and illustrated so beautifully in their 2012 book Gifts of the Crow.


Touching gifts

Add to this the story of Gabi Mann, the eight-year-old girl in Seattle who hit the headlines recently for receiving presents for the past four years from the crows she feeds. Items include paper clips, a yellow bead, coloured glass and a piece of Lego.

Her mother installed a birdcam to record the crows in action. Perhaps the most striking incident concerns a lens cap, which Gabi’s mother had misplaced, only to find it carefully positioned on the edge of their bird bath. The footage revealed that it had indeed been returned by a crow, who had gone to the trouble of rinsing the cap first.

Gabi’s story prompted many readers to post similar recollections. For example, fellow American Lynn Witte describes her aptly named pet, Sheryl Crow, giving her gifts, from feathers and bottle caps to a yellow foam dart and a Santa figurine. Not all the presents are quite so pleasant – often the delivery will include a dead chick or a morsel of road kill.

So why do crows give presents, and what does this tell us, if anything, about their intelligence?

We know that these birds are obsessive collectors: they hide food for future consumption, but they also stash other objects. My aviary walls are full of stones, feathers, bottle tops and marbles that have been cached by rooks and jays. We also know that crows are socially savvy and usually pair for life, so the pair bond is very important.

Bonding exercise

Experiments in my laboratory have shown that these birds spend much of their courtship during the breeding season presenting gifts of food to their mates – this is essential for maintaining the pair bond. Crows are a social species and young birds will share objects as well as food to establish relationships with other birds, not just their partners.

Such behaviour is a sign of relatively sophisticated intelligence. In the case of jays we have observed which foods the males give to their partners and how much. The results have shown that once a male jay has seen what his mate has eaten before, he remembers what she wants, and is prepared to supply this, even when that desire conflicts with what he wants himself. This ability to know what another individual wants, even when it differs from what you want, is a sophisticated skill called theory of mind. This doesn’t develop in children until they are at least about four years old.

It is no wonder that these crows have acquired the nickname “feathered apes” – their intelligence is on a par with that of chimpanzees.

That the birds can extend gift giving to humans is fascinating, but the fact that they bestow presents on particular humans is not surprising given that crows recognise individual human faces and can remember them for years. The giving of presents between birds most likely evolved for establishing and maintaining pair bonds, and with tame crows it has been extended to relationships with humans. That’s why Gabi’s gifts are not likely to stop any time soon.

Nicola Clayton is the professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the Royal Society