If crows played rummy

I have a rather guilty secret. I like watching nature documentaries. And the reason is that for so many years I have kept myself so woefully ignorant about matters scientific that almost anything I watch is a revelation.

For instance, I’m in the middle of watching the multi-disk, nine-hour-plus set put out by the BBC entitled “Planet Earth,” and I’m riveted by the photography and the privations endured by the filmmakers to capture the footage (such as spending days on end in a cave filming a massive column of bat dung that also serves as a feeding ground for cockroaches).

These days, I don’t automatically turn to the TSN five-pin bowling championship live from Ancaster, or the British beer and darts Superleague channel. I’m much more likely to check the serious fare on PBS and the Discovery Channel. And I’m coming away with the impression that we if are ahead of other animals in the intelligence department, it’s only by a nose. Our competitors? How about raccoons and crows, to take a couple of examples.

A recent PBS Nature show on raccoons basically invited us to conclude that we have to throw in the towel: anything we can do, they can undo better. I guess that gesture was already made for us when Toronto-based Porter Airlines named a raccoon as its corporate spokesperson, to promote the concept of ‘Flying Refined.” If a raccoon tells me the service is refined—presumably, a departure lounge that has complimentary garbage to eat and comfortable fences to sit on—then I will find it refined too.

And then a few days ago, Nature turned its attention to crows. Crows, apparently, have one of the biggest brains of all birds. To prove it, the camera followed one crow species in the southern Pacific that fashions its own tools. And then it gave the crow a test. There was a food reward, but it was beyond reach unless the crow could dig it out with Tool A; in turn, Tool A was beyond reach until the crow could reach it by using Tool B; and Tool B had to be untangled from a piece of string. So the crow didn’t just have to be dextrous; it had to figure out the sequence of application of the tools.

The crow passed its test rather nonchalantly: it surveyed the scene for a few seconds, and then calmly secured its food reward by following the get-tool-B to get-tool-A to get-the-reward plan laid out for it.

Then I began considering how well, or not so well, I played a simple board game like Rummikub (a variant of rummy that is played with tiles instead of cards, but that requires you to meld sets and runs out of your hand in logical sequence with sequences on the table). Toward the end of a game, you can usually make about three or four consecutive moves; that is, you can if you remember the move you so cleverly imagined before your turn came up. And when you remember it after your turn has come and gone, you engage in bitter recriminations with yourself about your own stupidity. Oh yes, the game is a lot of fun. (“Eight to adult,” it says on the box. That should have been my tipoff. Design the game for adults only and I might stand a fighting chance of keeping my dignity.)

This has all left me with two unsettling thoughts. Could I pass the three-stage test that the crow passed so easily? Would a crow beat me at Rummikub? I’m not sure I want to answer either one.

And if that weren’t bad enough, the crow show warned us that scientists are only just figuring out that there is a ‘crow language’; that crows may have up to 200 discrete sounds they can make in order to communicate with one another. So now I worry about those sounds. Just what are crows saying to each other about us? Is some of it mildly derisive?

Maybe we’ll discover that crows tell one another ‘people’ jokes. “So this raccoon, this crow and this human walk into a diner and the waitress says ‘our specials today are meatloaf, chicken and sausages.’ The raccoon says ‘I’ll have the sausages.” The crow says ‘I’ll have the chicken.” And the human says ‘What were the specials again?’”

Yes, maybe our only consolation is that, even if they do outsmart us and will inherit the earth, crows don’t have any better sense of humour than we do. But I’m pretty well at the point where I think it’s equally probable that they do; and that we’re just not smart enough to appreciate it.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.