Julia Barrett's World

Except when you’re talking about my parrot, in which case, you’d be describing a pure narcissist.

It’s all about her. She may have a vocabulary of 30 words which ain’t bad for an animal with a brain the size of a lentil, but still, it’s all about her. Thank God dinosaurs got smaller because a narcissistic full-size dinosaur would make a very bad pet.

But I digress.

Altruism: selfless concern for the welfare of others.

I recently witnessed an act of altruism. I was at the grocery store on a cold, wet day and I noticed a large crow standing on the edge of a garbage can. As I watched, he picked carefully through the trash and when he found an especially juicy tidbit, he leaned over and dropped it onto the ground where six more crows waited patiently. I stood still, fascinated, watching the dumpster diving crow drop pieces of food onto the pavement for his friends. Family. Tribe. He didn’t eat a single morsel. He gave away everything he found. I was entranced. I already know that crows are intelligent and I know they live together in mobs. I also know crows cooperate. Birds in the Corvidae family are quick learners. There are all sorts of anecdotes about crows cooperating with each other and with other species in order to survive.

How many of you have seen crows fly high up into the air to drop nuts onto the pavement, or even better, drop nuts in front of your car so that you can crush the shell for them? I find this behavior so interesting that if I miss the nut, I’ll turn around and make another pass in order to crush it.

Once while waiting for my daughter to finish up with soccer practice, I heard this piteous crying coming from the roof of the nearby high school. It was a young crow and he was trapped by a vicious diving seagull. Every time he tried to fly off the roof, the seagull attacked. As his cries grew more desperate, I saw a large crow fluttering his wings in a tall redwood tree. The crow flew off, but he returned within a few minutes, accompanied by several other crows. Unnoticed by the seagull, they gathered in the tree. More crows joined them. Within minutes, there were at least 20 crows, sitting in silence, watching the seagull attack the hapless and terrified young crow. At last the large crow made a sound, like a call to arms, and all the crows spread their wings and flew up into the air simultaneously. They surrounded the seagull in a scene straight out of The Birds. They closed in and knocked him down onto the roof, eventually chasing him away. All the crows gathered around the young bird. First they accompanied him to the tree, then they all flew off together.

I guess there’s no real point to this story except that it’s an interesting example of the things we all share. Well…except my parrot, but she does say “Wake up” every morning and “Night Tib” every night, so I guess that kind of counts as sharing certain characteristics with humans.

Here’s a book I love: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason. It would make a wonderful Christmas gift for an animal lover.

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Tags: animal intelligence, corvids, crows

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 14th, 2010 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Books, nature, popular culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.