The crow that was never caught still knows the face
9 views · 3 hours ago
Can a crow that was never caught learn to distrust a face it never saw up close? American researchers watched wild birds scold a masked man, including birds that had never dealt with him directly.
Publicité
Publicité
The story begins with an unpleasant experience. Wild American crows were captured, banded and released by researchers wearing a mask. The birds remembered that face and kept recognising it for at least 2.7 years.
The most telling part concerns the others. Crows that had never been captured learned to scold the same mask by watching their fellow crows. The behaviour spread at least 1.2 km from the original site, over a five-year period at one study site.
Birds that had lived through the capture did distinguish the dangerous mask from a neutral one more precisely than those that learned from their peers, so both sources of information seem to be used. PET brain scans of these wild crows also show increased activity in an area comparable to the amygdala when they see faces linked to a threat.
