monsieur le corbeau
Crows hide things. Food mostly, but other things as well—scraps of paper, shiny bits of metal, almost anything that attracts their attention. Caching, as it’s called, requires intelligence. The crow has to memorize both what was hidden and where it was hidden—quite a feat for a bird. But caching demands more than mad memorization skillz; it requires a complex sort of intelligence that recognizes a need to hide things. In order to cache food a crow has to have what’s known as ‘theory of mind.’ This refers to the ability of a being, through empathy and imagination, to consider what another being can see and what another being thinks. In other words, in order to hide things successfully, a crow has to be able to think like a thieving crow—it has to consider where another crow would look, and hide its stuff elsewhere. Researchers have even reported crows caching objects in plain sight of other crows, then returning alone later and re-hiding the object in another location. Hiding the object in the first location was, in effect, a feint to fool the other crows.
‘If men had wings and black feathers,’ wrote Henry Ward Beecher, ‘few of them would be clever enough to be crows.’ Look at this clever fellow. He has his secrets. He knows where he’s hidden his stuff. And by the look of him, he probably knows where you’ve hidden yours.
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