WILD BIRD WEDNESDAY - Lest We Forget

Before I show you today’s birds on WBW on this "Armistice Day", I have posted this shot in tribute to all the men and women who died or were injured in any of the wars in our world.

When I was making this post I wondered what birds are best at remembering things and I came up with birds in the Crow family also Pigeon, however today I will featured the Crow family. The photographs below are of Rook, Carrion Crow, Hooded Crow and Jackdaw.

Crows and humans share the ability to recognize faces and associate them with negative, as well as positive, feelings.

“The regions of the crow brain that work together are not unlike those that work together in mammals, including humans,” said John Marzluff, University of Washington professor of environmental and forest sciences. “These regions were suspected to work in birds but not documented until now.

“For example it appears that birds have a region of their brain that is analogous to the amygdala of mammals,” he said. “The amygdala is the region of the vertebrate brain where negative associations are stored as memories.  Previous work primarily concerned its function in mammals while our work shows that a similar system is at work in birds.  Our approach could be used in other animals – such as lizards and frogs – to see if the process is similar in those vertebrates as well.”

The crows were captured by investigators all wearing masks that the researchers referred to as the threatening face.  The crows were never treated in a threatening way, but the fact they’d been captured created a negative association with the mask they saw.  Then for the four weeks they were in captivity, they were fed by people wearing a mask different from the first, this one called the caring face.  The masks were based on actual people’s faces and both bore neutral expressions so the associations made by the crows was based on their treatment.

Studies have demonstrated that crows can learn to recognize human faces, and hold onto that memory (and sometimes a grudge) for a long time. Researchers from the University of Washington wanted to go deeper and understand how they do so at the level of the brain. They were interested to find out whether crows recognized faces using the same neural processes as humans, or in another way with which we were not yet familiar.

To find out, the researchers captured twelve wild American crows while wearing a particular mask of a human face. For four weeks following their capture, they fed and cared for the crows while wearing a different mask. The idea was to see if the birds would recognize one face (mask) as the “threatening” one that captured them, and the other face as the “caring” one that brought them delicious food.

One by one, they took the crows and presented them with a view of one of the two faces, or simply an empty room. Since you can’t keep a crow calmly strapped inside a brain scanner while this is going on, they gave the crows a chemical that functions as a sort of dye or marker. When a part of the brain becomes active, it takes in this chemical from the bloodstream. Afterward, they anesthetized the crow and placed it in a PET scanner. The areas of the brain that contained the chemical marker showed up clearly, allowing the researchers to see what parts of the brain had been busy while the crow was checking out the sights they were shown.

 From the images (as well as the crows’ behavior), they were able to tell that the crows recognized the “threatening” and “caring” faces as just that—no surprise there. Interestingly, they did so by using the same regions of the brain that humans do when they process images of faces and associate them with the relevant emotions.

Why is this useful information? The researchers explain, “Understanding how wild animals integrate perception, memory, and emotion to behave adaptively may allow researchers to generalize important findings across species and sensory modalities, develop strategies to lower stress in captive animals, shape animal actions to reduce human-wildlife conflicts, and engage the public to appreciate the cognitive capacity of other species.”

Researchers have only tested crow memory for five years, but they believe that the birds remember faces for their entire lives - fifteen to forty years. Get on the wrong side of one crow and you could be mobbed everywhere for the rest of your life.  No wonder they talk about a “murder” of Crows!

My advice - Don't mess with Crows!!

I hope you enjoyed this very different post.

I am linking this post with WILD BIRD WEDNESDAY

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