🍄 Crow Business

Clever corvids have built a human-like culture… or is it the reverse? Either way, the idea has taken flight. Celebrate Earth Day with some smart friends...

Apr 18, 2025

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The crows came first.

Not the engineers,
not the corporate strategists,
not the marketers mapping out efficiency curves in glass towers.
It was the crows that had already built the model for innovation,
for collaboration, for working at the speed of collective intelligence.

They were watching before we were watching, sharing before we understood what it meant to share. Their networks hum in the sky, a synaptic spread of black wings and bright eyes, a cooperative calculus in motion. They pass knowledge like we pass down myths—generational, durable, alive. When a crow crafts a tool, the flock does not just observe; they iterate, refine, improve. Their ideas are cumulative, their culture resilient. In the evolutionary race toward intelligence, humans have been sprinting. Crows have been flying. Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. Never mind robots, the crows could be coming. From social networks and vocal numeracy to tool-making tips and acts of kindness—have crows mastered “how-to human” on the sly?

Flying, it turns out, is more efficient.

While we struggle to translate knowledge across borders, companies, and generations, crows have perfected it in murmurs and caws. They remember faces, reward generosity, and punish betrayal. They do not work alone, and neither should we. Their form of progress is not just about invention—it’s about adaptability, a shared purpose written into the wind.

If there is a blueprint for the future of work, it is not in the sterile boardrooms of Silicon Valley but in the tangled rookeries above our cities. A million quiet revolutions happening in the trees, each feathered mind a node in an ever-expanding system of intelligence. The real question is: are we smart enough to follow their lead?

"Many believe that only humans possess the complexity to have culture,” reports Duquesne University’s scientific journal The D.U.Quark. “However, many other species have been found to hold the universal key elements of culture such as American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) and New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides).”

“One of the reasons that crows are so successful is because they are so adaptive,” ornithologist and author Steve Betchkal tells Wisconsin Life. “They are omnivorous, so just about anything that has caloric value is fit for consumption. They are also not picky about habitat. They do require trees for nesting or roosting, but they’re just fine if those trees are next to human habitation. Additionally, crows aren’t migratory, so they don’t face the kind of stressors that long-distance migrants do.”

And they’re smart, very smart.

Imagine a world where innovation teams operated like crows—fluid, opportunistic, unbothered by shifting landscapes, scavenging brilliance from whatever the environment offered, building solutions from the discarded edges of convention. They wouldn’t just adapt; they’d outthink, outlast, and probably judge you from the highest vantage point available. Don’t you wish your team were crows?

Pecking order

“I’d put them pretty high on the list of intelligence,” Dr Sarah Jelbert, a comparative psychologist at the University of Bristol, tells Dan Schreiber on The Rough Corner podcast. “There are certain species that jump out like primates or dolphins, we hear more about things like octopus now too, but parrots and corvids—that whole crow family are up there definitely. I would put them really at the top of the list in terms of intelligent species.”

Crows have already captivated many cultures due to their intelligence, mysterious nature, and connection to both life and death. They are seen as messengers, protectors, or symbols of transformation. In Native American traditions, they are considered sacred birds with deep ties to the spirit world. Tribes like the Hopi and Sioux respect them as spiritual guides, bringing wisdom and messages from ancestors, symbolizing change and personal growth. And in Hindu culture, crows are believed to carry the souls of deceased loved ones and are honored during rituals like Shradh, where offerings are made to them to ensure the spirits of the ancestors are at peace.

Crows shape human beliefs, storytelling,
and even the way societies function.

They move through the world with an intelligence that forces people to reconsider what they think they know about cognition, communication, and hierarchy. They recognize faces, solve puzzles, exchange favors. They remember. In their own way, they govern themselves—leaders emerge, cooperation forms, debts are paid. The idea of a “pecking order” isn’t just something humans impose; crows embody it, negotiate it, work within it. People watch them, fascinated, assigning meaning, weaving them into myths, calling them messengers, omens, guides. Everywhere, they remind humans of something just out of reach—an intelligence familiar, yet foreign, reflecting back the structures people build for themselves.

Bird brain

Because their brains appeared to be less developed than primate brains, scientists assumed birds were incapable of high-level functions known to take part in the prefrontal cortex—which they do not have—like problem-solving, decision making, developing plans, and maintaining a working memory. "The question of how crows, which do not have a prefrontal cortex like humans and other mammals, are capable of high-level thinking, has largely remained a mystery,” reports KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station. “That always was kind of the black box,” admits Marzluff. “When they do these really great things, is it just some more robotic response or is it really a reasoned response?”

Geometric intuition—the ability to recognize structure in a shape, like right angles, symmetry, and parallel lines—was seen as a mark of human cognition. Researchers tested crow’s ability to process structure, finding they are excellent shape-spotters, adding geometry to their already impressive mathematical skills. Carrion crows (Corvus corone) aced simple geometry tests—like spotting the odd one out in a set of six shapes and picking a crescent moon from a group of stars with little trouble.

Now, animal physiologist Andreas Nieder from the University of Tübingen in Germany, is winging a new idea. He suggests that in the 320 million years since birds and primates split, each has developed different brain structures, but that those differently composed brains have developed similar cognitive capabilities.

“The neurons that have been found in humans and monkeys, and now in crows, are behaving exactly the same way,” said Nieder. “They're switching their activity, not as a function of the visual input, but as a function of the subjective perception of the organism. It seems that evolution invented a different anatomical structure to give rise to the same physiological properties, and therefore also cognitive behaviors.” He compared these very unique brain structures to the wings of birds, versus the wings of bats or flying bugs. “The wings look very different,” he said. “But the function is the same.”

This matters because it shatters the long-standing assumption that intelligence is a singular path, a straight evolutionary line leading only to primates, to humans, to the familiar architecture of the prefrontal cortex. Instead, intelligence emerges wherever it can, shaped by different materials, different structures, yet producing the same astonishing results. Crows don’t just mimic intelligence; they embody it, built from something unfamiliar yet functionally the same. Culture follows suit. It builds myths, systems, hierarchies around what is perceived as intelligence—who has it, who doesn’t, who leads, who follows. But if evolution can shape thinking in parallel ways, from primates to birds, from neocortex to nidopallium, then maybe culture, too, is not bound to a single form. Maybe the systems that humans cling to—hierarchies, economies, power structures—are just one version of what is possible. Maybe intelligence, like flight, finds its own way.

Reverse psychology

“In medieval times, the bubonic plague was thought to be spread by the birds, and humans reacted to them with fear and loathing,” writes the AAAS. “In subsequent centuries and decades, humans have attempted to frighten crows and ravens from land with skulls and scarecrows—and they have endeavored to shoot, bomb and poison them. But in bird society, fear and weariness of humans are also common.”

Marzluff and his team were the first to look at crow brains during experiments using a PET scan, a non-invasive technology that uses a radioactive tracer to detect which parts of a brain are active at a particular moment. He shows how a bird’s terror of humans, maps to their brain the same way fear maps to the human brain.

“One of our most primitive emotions is fear and learning to fear things and respond appropriately to dangerous situations. And crows, of course, do that very well,” says Marzluff. Human fear response happens in our amygdala, deep within the temporal lobes of our brain, an area associated with emotional processes. The sight of something that scares us activates a fight or flight response, igniting motor functions to either run for safety or to defend. When a crow is frightened by a human, their brains light up the same way. “Absolutely we’re having that same neural response to one another, which is interesting,” Marzluff tells the AAAS. “I think it’s the way that we show our shared heritage, you know, even as many millions of years ago as it was.”

This forces a reckoning with the stories humans tell themselves about superiority, dominion, and separation from the rest of the living world. Fear binds species together as much as intelligence does, wiring survival into the deepest folds of the brain. But fear is also a form of recognition. It means crows are not just reacting; they are learning, adapting, passing knowledge down through generations, the way human cultures do. Myths rise from these interactions—crows as omens, as tricksters, as messengers from the dead. But in reality, they are something else: a mirror. Their fear reflects human aggression, their intelligence echoes human cunning, their survival strategies play out in miniature the same social calculations and adaptations that shape civilizations. If crows can learn the rules of human culture, then maybe human culture has something to learn from crows.

Crow some kindness

Crows are also in the business of giving back, adding to the argument for “culture.” “Cultural values are defined as the principles, standards, or qualities considered worthwhile or desirable, this term is somewhat synonymous with morals or ethics,” writes The D.U.Quark. “Crows can engage in gift-giving behaviors, and this can be interpreted as a form of morality and reciprocity as they have only been documented giving gifts to crows in their flock and humans who regularly feed them.” This act of care and fairness highlights their advanced social cognition and ability to form symbiotic relationships.

"Specifically, when a crow was able to locate someone’s dropped lens, carried the lens back, cleaned the lens in the bird bath, and left the lens on the tray for her to see, this deliberate act suggests a sense of gratitude in social exchange. Crows show appreciation and strengthen social bonds by gifting valuable items to humans, demonstrating their deep intelligence and ability to engage in complex interactions resembling human moral norms.”

This challenges the assumption that culture belongs solely to humans.

Reciprocity, fairness, gratitude—these are not just abstract human ideals but lived realities in the minds of crows. They remember faces, return favors, and build relationships across species, not just within their own. Their actions suggest that culture is not just about language or art or history but about connection, about recognizing and valuing others, about the unseen web of relationships that shape survival. If a crow can recognize kindness and respond in kind, then the boundaries of culture are not as rigid as once thought. Maybe intelligence is not the only measure of worth. Maybe what matters is how a species chooses to relate—to each other, to humans, to the world. And if culture is ultimately about relationships, then crows are not just participants but architects, shaping an invisible yet undeniable exchange with the humans who feed them, who fear them, who watch them, and who, despite everything, remain endlessly fascinated by them.

Humans are always looking for models—patterns to copy, systems that work, blueprints for survival, for innovation, for how to get along.

They build machines that mimic nature, study ant colonies for efficiency, borrow from the flight of birds to shape their own aerodynamics. But maybe the best model has been right there all along, perched on a telephone wire, watching. Crows already know how to live in complex societies, how to share knowledge, how to balance competition with cooperation. They remember, they give, they recognize each other across time and space. They don’t waste energy on divisions that don’t serve them. If humans want a new way forward, a new model for resilience, intelligence, and collaboration, they might not need to look any further than the crows. Just be the crows in human form—adaptive, strategic, generous when it counts—and suddenly, the world opens up, full of possibilities waiting to be recognized.

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