Crows Using Automobiles as Nutcrackers: The Evidence

[Benton Library Media Center]

This is Mrs. Corey posting as Benton Library again. :)

There's a great amount of evidence, both within peer-reviewed academic journals and in other sources, surrounding crows and their use of tools. One of the great examples is the observation of crows using automobiles as nutcrackers. It appears that the first evidence to appear in any journal was an article by Terry Maple in West Birds in 1974. The original article cites "multiple observations" of crows dropping walnuts onto a busy street near UC-Davis. Not much literature is cited, nor is his evidence well-documented. However, this article definitely started a discussion concerning tool-use by crows that is still going on to this day.

In 1997, some researchers at UC-Davis wanted to put the case to rest. They documented their observations and accounted for statistical inaccuracies. They determined that this tool-use was a common misconception by casual observers but do not entirely discount the possibility. The researchers even discuss the following:

In fact, using cars as nutcrackers might not be advantageous to crows. When a nut is crushed by a car, a single bird can no longer monopolize the nut, because the meat adheres firmly to the road surface.

However, the debate has continued. An article published in 1999 in Behavioral Ecology (again, peer-reviewed) supports the idea of crows using automobiles as tools for cracking nuts. I wanted to point out how long the peer review process can take. Here's a screenshot of the submission and acceptance dates for this particular article:

Not surprisingly, non-peer reviewed sources like Wikipedia cite this behavior (see the entry regarding Crows - Intelligence. And YouTube has a great video showing these crows in action:


So bringing this back to the idea of "right" and "wrong" information . . . you can definitely see this issue isn't black and white. It's much debated and the evidence is varied. If we were to assign shades of gray to each source, which would be darkest?

Image:

"Hooded crow with a nut" by Kristof Borkowski via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons license.

[josh steltenpohl]

i would have to say that the info from UC-Davis is the most accurate info, because it was done at a university. Also because it is up to date, and was approved to be published.

[Kylie Warner]

i don't think that what I have to day is going to be very original because the video is like everyone else said not very believable. I would def give it a lighter shade. I like how shelby said it was set up because thats what i was thinking when i was watching it.

But when reading, some things stuck out and other sources were just like making stuff up. It;s really hard to tell whether crows are that smart or not. I dont think any of it is very reliable.

[Amanda Dixon]

oh my -- crows & automobiles? I don't think so. The video was really staged and most of the articles i read were half and half. I read a lot of articles stating that the crows just simply dropped the nuts on the ground to break them.

This website states that crows using the car as nut crackers is not likely, they said that if a crow was in the road with a nut and a car was coming they would more likely fly away with the nut or if they left it a fellow crow would come take it.

I believe that maybe some crows are using cars as nutcrackers but as a species i don't think they all do. I think a lot of this had to do with location, crows in California may be doing this while crows in Missouri are not? its a very debatable topic.

[Hunter Ewart]

This whole crows automible thing realy is very strange. I mean hoe smart are crows really do we know hostly i was shocked to actually see the crow crack a nut like that. Either it was a freak accident or the birds have really been holding out on us the whole time. It got to be the darkest it just doeant make any since to me. Yes you can train annimals but they do have a mind of there own. It could have easy been planned and prefor,ed just to cause a big debate about how smart crows actually are.

[Benton Library Media Center]

Kerstyn, you've really hit on something I didn't mention the other day in regards to CONTENT and that's AUDIENCE. This is really one of the big misgivings about using peer-reviewed publications . . . sometimes you have no clue what they authors are even talking about!

I'm going to throw another one of the library jargon-filled concepts at you and that's FRAMING THE QUESTION (and no, my caps lock key isn't broken, I'm just adding emphasis). When you're given an assignment, have a question, or are presented with a prompt, one of the first steps you can take is to frame the question, which basically means asking yourself, "What exactly is it I'm trying to answer?"

Let me take this crow issue as an example . . . so let's say you're in this class and Mr. Nash asks you to prepare for a discussion about crow intelligence. What is the question you trying to answer? In this case, it's pretty open-ended, so you can generate questions about crow intelligence. (This is sort of a brainstorming session in a way, but when you actually generate your own QUESTIONS it prepares you to find INFORMATION and that helps you direct your RESEARCH.) So here's some questions I can think of . . .

What are some signs of crow intelligence? What do they do that may be different from humans or even other birds? Are birds intelligent, anyway?

So taking this back to the concept of AUDIENCE . . . for these questions, a very scholarly, peer-reviewed source might be overwhelming. We don't necessarily need to think about methodology, citations, credentials, etc. to answer a question like that.

However, if we had a different prompt . . . say, writing an end-of-semester paper about crow intelligence, we'd want all those FACTS, FACTS, FACTS.

Also, I don't know why they've studied this for centuries . . . but in my academic world we still debate call numbers and other silly things. Welcome to academia. :)

[Laci Shoemaker]

I'm going to have to agree with what Shandis, Cole, Taylor, Shelby, basically everyone, with what they said about how the video wasn't very believable. I'm kind of iffy on it. I think most definitely crows are smart enough to do it, but it'd be hard to catch something like that in action, so I think it was just a set up, to make that crow seem smarter than it actually is. :-) This is a weird, yet interesting debate, about a crow. :-P

[Kerstyn Bolton]

I have never heard anything about this issue before now and I must say that it's quite strange. I think birds are fairly smart animals, but this is a bit to the extreme. The article, "researchers at UC-Davis" would be the darkest source out of the four, because it had very detailed incidents and had relevant information to the topic. It seemed like the other two articles were redundant and kept repeating different times when crows dropped their nuts. I may be a bit biased on this, because it's very hard to believe that multiple crows are doing this, but I do believe the darkest source is the one trying to close the case of "crows using automobiles as nutcrackers."

Now the YouTube video was the strangest of them all. At first I thought it was pretty cool and then realized anyone can do anything with video editing. First of all, the video was very choppy and when the nut was cracked by the car you could tell it was staged. I would consider this video mostly white, because it's somewhat false. The last article you mentioned was way too wordy and long. Honestly, it was hard to even follow, because it overwhelmed me with FACTS, FACTS, FACTS. The whole conversation of crows doing this is confusing to me in the first place.. one of the articles said they'd been studying this for centuries and I still can't understand why.

In conclusion, crows using cars as nutcrackers? It's hard to swallow. The YouTube source wasn't very helpful, because I could tell it was staged, but the other sources were helpful. The one trying to close the case of this would be the darkest, because they backed up almost everything they said. To have an opinion on this issue I would have to research more, but I really don't want to because it's not something I'm interested in. But I can say that it's something very different and could be possible, but I just don't care to know.

[Shelby Hawkins]

Wow, I'm having trouble seeing why this is such a big debate. I'm still on the fence, I definitely think crows are smart enough to do it. The video was probably set up just to illustrate the pro-smart crow side, and not represent any theories against it. So, the video was biased. Shandis also said the author was not very credible, which is also a huge deal. However, there are articles out there with authors who are titled and peer reviewed. Overall, I think more research needs to be done.

[Blayr Bolton]

Oh my. I'm going to definitely say I don't believe that video for a moment. It looks very staged to me. Especially because nothing that happened was filmed altogether. It was the crow dropping the nut. The nut being cracked. And the crow retrieving the nut. It looks like this was all done separtely and thrown together to look as one. I'm not sure if this guy was just trying to show the jist of what happens or if this was meant to be proof of this arguement, but either way it fails. So, yes the youtube video is very white. Maybe extra white. ;)

Besides the video. Even though the video may be completely unbelievable, I just may believe that crows use cars as nut crackers. Terry Maple in West Birds in 1974 might have weak currency, but he gives a convincing presentation. I like his positive and negative aspects he throws into his work. Researchers at UC-Davis (white content) claim that the nuts getting hit by the car is just 'accidental.' But, I'm wondering about all of the crows that they haven't spent their lives around studying. The crows they watched may not have steadily dropped nuts in the pathways of cars, but what about other crows in the U.S.? Or even outside of the U.S. Article published in 1999 in Behavioral Ecology honestly had a little too much accuracy for me. I''m not sure if that makes sense, but it was too research and graph based for me to even want to read. That sounds terrible, but it's true!

Overall, I definitely think that it's possible that crows use cars to crack their nuts. I mean, have all of these researchers and scientists honestly observed every crow on earth? I doubt it. It could just be their field of crows that wasn't straight up using the cars. You never know. :) Maybe I'm being to optimistic, but it certainly seems logical to me that it's a possibility.

I'm just curious who would start an arguement over this topic? It seems to be a pretty huge debate, but about crows? :) Interesting.

[Coleman Wade Babcock]

i have to agree with shandis and marcee on this. i could tell by the video that the shots were set up to make it seem that the birds were intentionally using the cars as nutcrackers but i just didnt bye it. I know that you can get a shot then get it together with another shot that makes it appear to be intentionall but there was to much that was, as marcee said "cheesy". there also was to much stuff on the databases that i looked up in class and there was really no evidence that made me say "wow they could be intentionally doing that".

it could just be a coincidence (sorry for the spelling) that the birds are doing this but to say that they are intentially doing this and more than just a group of birds are doing this, seems kind of rediculous. Birds are not that smart so i have to day its bogus