Not Quite A Bird Brain - Corvids Can Clean Up Our Mess!

There are lots of clever animals out there and in fact the task of even trying to define whether an animal is intelligent or not is a difficult process in of itself. But I’m sure you all know and will agree that the 126 species which are found within the Corvidae family all exhibits some form of intelligence. 

Corvidae’s or corvids for short are a family of birds in which you can find species such as crows, ravens and jays. As a family they can be found across the world on every continent apart from Antarctica and many of them regularly perform tasks which can be construed as intelligent. This intelligence can be attributed to the fact that some species of crows possess a brain to body weight ratio equal to that of great apes, whales, dolphins and porpoises. As a family they do range in size and colour with the smallest weighing only 41g and the heaviest being the thick-billed raven sometimes exceeding 1400g. They are non-migratory however some populations have been known to temporary relocate to other regions where the conditions are better, a behaviour which is usually driven by food shortage.  

Now there is a reason I have chosen to write about corvids today as I have heard about a Dutch start-up company which have come up with an environment idea using crows. Their idea is to use crows to pick up the billions of cigarette butts which are thrown onto the ground each year. This is a real problem as in 2016, 258 billion cigarettes were produced in the USA alone, now while some of these would have been disposed of responsibly many would have simply been dropped. Add this to the fact that it takes 18months – 10 years to degrade depending on the environmental conditions they become a huge problem.

The Start-up plans to release trained crows which have learnt to bring these butts and other small bits of rubbish to a special station where it would then be weighed and scanned and dropped into a collection pot whilst some food would be released for the bird. This is an idea which has already been proven to work. Also the beauty of it is that hopefully by releasing a few birds which have been trained to litter pick others will observe this behaviour and then copy in order to benefit from the free food.

There are people who question whether we should be using animals to collect our rubbish. This is understandable as it will affect their natural behaviour stopping them from foraging in the ‘natural’ method. Saying this however corvids have been observed using bread crumbs to catch fish and dropping nuts and other food items into roads so they are easily broken open by vehicles, so when you look at these events you can see that humans are already affecting corvids behaviour. There is also another issue with the fact that the cigarette butts could be easily ingested and then kill the birds. So I’ll let you decide what you think but I think that this is a good idea.

Thanks for reading!

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