Crows know how to count out loud

Crows counting out loud? Until now we thought that only humans knew how to do this.

Another “man’s own” that falls. “Corvids are the first animals, other than humans, known to produce a deliberate number of calls on command”underlines the review Nature, on May 23. Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloon tells us about this experience, carried out in Germany with crows.

franceinfo: These crows managed to learn to count to 4, out loud?

Mathilde Fontez: Yes, crows: more precisely, black crows. We knew that this species is endowed with formidable intelligence – it has been studied extensively for this. She takes another step forward. Counting out loud, until then, we only knew humans who knew how to do that. In the laboratory, they managed to croak up to 4.

How was the experience?

The researchers worked with three carrion crows that had already been trained to croak on command. They showed them videos that showed the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4. And with rewards, they encouraged them to simply croak the numbers.

They had to produce the right number of sounds, and press enter to receive food. The vast majority of them have succeeded – sometimes, however, they are wrong. And the researchers were able to verify that they knew in advance what they were going to say: depending on the number, the intonation of their croaks changed from the start. In short, they were able to demonstrate, in these crows, a new high-level controlled cognitive process.

This isn’t the first time that animals have demonstrated math?

No, experiments are accumulating which show that many animals are capable of understanding and handling simple operations. Crows, primates of course, but also fish, bears, cuttlefish, ants… the chick!

All these species have notions of numeration: they are capable of representing quantities in the form of numbers, and of comparing them. Some know how to do small additions or subtractions. We have known since 2018 that bees have a notion of zero: they perceive that it is the size of the empty set and a quantity smaller than all the others.

And already, in 2023, it had been demonstrated that crows know how to make decisions based on statistical observations. And now they count out loud. Clearly, there are no longer many basic mathematical notions that remain unique to man. Not much difference between animals and us. We had also spoken about it with the primatologist Frans de Waal, his impression: there is not one thing where we are different from animals, we just do a little better, here or there.