Crows count like humans

From Newsbuddy Desk

By the way, it has been seen in some studies earlier that crows have the ability to understand numbers. For example, if several boxes are placed in front of them and food items are kept in only 6 boxes, then they stop after turning over only 6 boxes. Or if crows are in a garden and some humans enter there, then they hide. And they remain hidden till all the humans leave. It was seen that they can do this ‘count’ up to 16. Similarly, in an experiment it was also seen that if some dots are marked on a screen, then they can understand whether the number of dots in two groups is equal or not.

And now zoologist Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen, Germany and his colleagues have added a new dimension to it. In their research paper published in the journal Science, the team has stated that this ability of crows can be helpful in understanding the development of number skills in humans.

The German researchers worked with three carrion crows (Corvus corone). These crows had been trained to caw on command. After this, for the next few months, they were taught that when they saw visual signals of 1, 2, 3 or 4 on the screen, they had to caw the same number of times. They were also introduced to such audio signals which were associated with each digit.

During the experiment, these crows stood in front of the screen and were given visual or audio signals. They were expected to caw the number matching that signal and after completing this task, they would peck on the ‘enter key’. If they did it right, they were given a tasty dish as a reward.