Corvid Smarts: Nothing New Under the Sun

No one out there doubts the brilliance of corvids–from spaniel-walking magpies to tool-using ravens. All the same, every little bit of evidence that trickles in gratifyingly confirms the intellectual (or at least the mental) superiority of the birds in black.

The latest brouhaha has been about the ability of Rooks (that’s a Common Raven above, of course) to learn to use solid objects to raise the water level in a closed container. This has been widely reported in the popular press and pretty much everywhere birders gather on the web; the paper describing the experiment is also available on line.

Interesting stuff. But it’s not new, not by a long shot.

The authors of this new paper–and every journalist who’s written a word about it–adduce the Aesopic story of the crow and the pitcher, in which a corvid (its identity varies from version to version) cleverly uses physics to get a drink. The headlines were inevitable: “Bird experiment shows fable may be true!”

But the fact is that this behavior was described scientifically half a century before any of the surviving Aesopic versions was written. (Hm, italics, I’m getting carried away here.) In fact, the fables were almost certainly inspired by the accounts in the great natural histories of late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the earliest preserved account of such behavior is not in a fable but in Pliny, who wrote in the middle of the first century of a “thirsty raven gathering rocks and dropping them into an urn in which there was some water the bird could not reach; afraid to go into the urn itself, the bird dropped in enough stones to make the water rise to where it could drink” (Nat. hist. X.43.125; my translation).

For the next 1600 years–at least through the publication in the seventeenth century of the great edition of Vincent of Beuvais’s Speculum–natural historians, scholars, and compilers of exotica repeated this account of the parched raven as scientific fact.

The fabulists went their own merry way, appending the almost painfully obvious moral about persistence and cleverness beating out brute force; but for a millenium and a half, it was simply part of the received scientific knowledge about crows that they drank from remote sources by displacing the water with stones.

What interests me here is not, I suppose, so much whether rooks really exhibit this behavior, or whether “fables” can be “true,” or whether corvids truly are “intelligent” in some sense. This episode instead tells us something about “science” and the way it is conducted at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Many of my friends in the white-coat gang are downright proud that their pursuits do not require any knowledge of what has come before them, relying on the naive notion that an objective physical reality awaits their “discovery.” But wouldn’t this rook paper have been a lot more satisfying had the authors conducted a little research before, so to speak, conducting their research?

visum per sitim lapides congerentem in situlam monimenti, in
qua pluvia aqua durabat, sed quae attingi non posset; it a descen-
dere paventem expressisse tali congerie quantum poturo suffi-
ceret