Crows make a point, lest humans get lost in their own hubris

We humans are usually less than complimentary when alluding to most of our fellow earthly creatures. Gorillas and apes to turkeys and chickens, snakes and weasels to rats and dodos, not to mention donkeys and asses, we evidently consider ourselves much above the rest. It is not surprising, however, that arrogant homo sapiens are finally being made to eat crow by, well, crows. It seems the birds are exactly what childhood fables have made them out to be: anything but birdbrained. Apart from famously extracting water from a pitcher by dropping stones to raise the level — a feat apparently immortalised by both Aesop and the Panchatantra— researchers have now established that corvids can carry out complex relational-matching tasks that we humans earlier only credited our primate cousins with accomplishing.

A bird species exhibiting the intelligence and acumen of seven-year-old humans — as researchers judge — may be nothing to crow about per se, but they could evolve further. Then there could be consequences if their perspicacity is not acknowledged, as we now know that crows remember faces and slights. At the very least, a certain 1963 Alfred Hitchcock avian classic may have to be reclassified from horror to docudrama. It may also be germane to remember that the collective noun for crows is ‘murder’.