A winter, more than 20 years ago, I noticed that every day, after having filled my bird feeders, a herd of crows came to eat in about five minutes. I couldn’t understand how they always seemed to know just when I placed the seed. The moment I did this was not the same every day, so I had no schedule for the crows to learn.
Marlene A. Condon
It was not as if they were all sitting there waiting because I would look around to see if crows were nearby before filling the feeders. After perplexing on this subject for a while, I finally decided that there must be at least one crow looking at me every day and that this crow then alerted the others from my activity.
Acting on my intuition, I looked at the sky while heading for the feeders and filling them. Indeed, I was obtaining a lonely crow crossing the sky (sometimes silently, sometimes growled), and in a few minutes, there would be a distance bar, then a gathering of crows for my documents! In winter, with leaves out of the trees, I could sometimes locate the crow perched in a tree in the forest (at a certain distance from my courtyard) before flying to gather the herd.
So, I was right, but it seemed difficult to believe. It was time to do research.
It turns out that the feathered creatures of the corvidae family (crows, jays and pies) are considered the most intelligent of all birds. Experiences with captive American crows have shown that they can have three or four; They quickly learn to associate various symbols with food and are good for resolving puzzles and “perform amazing memory exploits”.
Thus, it is quite possible that the crows around my court managed to associate me with food, and they had resolved the puzzle how to enjoy the food that I published by doing the duty to A crow to be on the lookout every day.
Apparently, my local crows have realized that a human leaves the house in this place every morning, and when he does, he distributes food. Because humans appear at various times, the only way for crows to take advantage of their generosity is to publish a sentry that can alert others at the time that man appears.
I do not know if the same crow presents itself every morning, but my observations suggest that sentinel crows can look at potential food sources. This behavior illustrates the value of being a social creature because the herd would be informed of my appearance and, therefore, of the availability of food.
Such recruitment behavior is undoubtedly the sign of an intelligent food strategy in which only one crow can communicate to others than food is now available in a particular place.