After that dude in Japan proved that birds have language and grammar I'm convinced that corvids have entire conversational structures that we do not understand. The only possible way to explain this is that this bird went away, told their friends about it, and told their friends who did it and where to find them. You can only explain that with proper language that can communicate complex things.
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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I once saw a crow get called to a meeting. It was pretty surreal.
crows in my yard know how to farm, they keep planting berry bushes everywhere, they dig and purposefully poop seeds into holes
It really is a shame we used up all the easily available resources to make a complex civilization. The corvids could've inherited the world after us 😔
Boy, do I have a book series for you
spoiler
The children of time
Spiders are not corvids :(
No, but Kern wasn't the only terraformer ;)
I saw them mourning the death of a magpie lark
Yeah corvids have been proven to have some level of culture as well as dialects across flocks, and it's well-established they pass knowledge about oddly specific things across generations. Scientists obv can't (yet) translate crowspeak, but computer analyzing subtle differences in pitch, spacing, rhythm, cadence, tongue clicks, etc. proves their chatter has complex structures, patterns, and rules to it
Crows have even recently been proven to be capable of recursion (structurally nesting abstract concepts inside other abstract concepts), which linguists previously assumed was strictly unique to humans, and recent research has shown crows "know what they know" and ponder the contents of their own minds
I think the grey area for many species of birds and sea mammals is not if they have complex communication systems, but how complex some of them truly are. Humanity's spent ages arrogantly assuming every chirp and whistle and click on the planet is just meaningless, primitive noise, and modern science is only just starting to catch up
Similarly, European colonizers assumed societies with huts and simpler technology were less intelligent. Meanwhile countless indigenous societies like that turned out to have languages far more complicated and sophisticated than European languages, cultures and traditions more vast and diverse, and their values generally far more altruistic and socially connective. (And they focused on community and connection over material advancement, were limited by environmental or chance factors, and/or philosophically/ spiritually opposed to artificial means of living that disconnected themselves from nature)
I want to talk to animals so badly.
Crows are known to be pretty smart birbs right?
Yep, corvids in general really
yes, and they can recognize human faces. all corvids are brainy.
That's one of the best things I've read this year, lmao
birds in general are much "smarter" (very vague term to describe animals but u get me) than we thought for a long time, and crows in particular are among the smartest of birds
Crows have comparable intelligence to an 8 year old child, or something like that
My late grandpa nursed an injured crow back to health in his 20's, and 60 years later, crows would still occasionally land on his shoulder when he sat on the park bench. No one else's
My friend also told me a murder of crows would consistently harass and try to peck his childhood cat whenever they saw her walking anywhere outside, so often that the cat was forced to become an indoor cat (crow beaks are very sharp). Their family spoke to a couple neighbors and found none of their cats ever had a problem with crows, even an outdoor cat of the same color. Suggesting his cat tried to pounce on a crow and the whole flock waged war against her specifically
Crows rock
i'm always saying this
Just a heads up, the OP link to the archived article doesn't work for me (takes me to a captcha that doesn't work and I wouldn't complete it if it did). I think it is a link that basically is telling archive.today to archive the article again. Fortunately it already has it archived and the actual link to the article already archived is simply:
It's a share link.
It's an http link and, for me anyway, it didn't automatically redirect to https. Adding the 's' fixed it.
Good catch on it not being https, but it still takes me to a captcha even with the s tacked on. The simple permalink to the actual archived article works fine.
Crows mentioned? Post the mandatory TED talk video
@ 6:43. I wanted to hear about the crow infidelity. 
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
#birdmode 
This is the first step towards becoming a Beastmaster
praxis tbh we need to learn how to turn the crows against the capitalists, they're natural allies in our fight for a better world