Nesting Crows - Building without a plan
My place is set up so that my computer is in front of a window. I just have to lift my eyes from my screen to be looking out into a little grove of white mulberry trees. The grove is a popular hangout place for some crows. Crows are fascinating to watch. These days (in March) I see couples hanging out close together on a branch.
Crows in a tree like that move as much by walking along a branch as by flying. I often wonder what they are looking for. Lately they have been favoring the thinnest branches to stroll along. Branches so thin that they bend and sway with the crow's weight. In this instance I discovered what they were looking for. They were looking for twigs small enough that they could snap them off with their beaks and fly away with it.
Sometimes they just fly to another branch and seem to proudly display their harvest. Other times they fly away out of sight - presumably to a nest being constructed. I hope each year that they will come and build a nest in the grove - no joy.
I have noticed that lately the ground has been littered with crow sized twigs. What's going on?
We know that crows are pretty intelligent birds. What is intelligence? Without getting too complicated let me say that crows seem to be intelligent because their actions seem comprehensible to us and I take it as given that we are intelligent.
But I kind of doubt that the cognition of crows is very much like ours. Well - let me rephrase - I don't think that crows really figure things out but that they have a bunch of instinctive behaviors that when strung together seem to show intention.
I think that a lot of our own behavior is much like a crow's. All foragers, whether human or crow, need to follow similar strategies to find what they are looking for, for instance. If you know that there is a treat hidden under these stones but you don't know under which, the obvious strategy is to just turn over each stone.. Humans might figure that out. But it might work for the crow to just have an instinct to turn over stones - perhaps they'd feel pleasure at the act.
With that in mind I pondered the set of instincts that crows have that enable them to build a nest. In the spring it seems that crows take pleasure in harvesting small twigs. They seem proud of their accomplishment. I imagine them regularly flying to a nest site I can't see with the twig and while there dropping the twig. Twigs would pile up. Once there was a pile of twigs big enough the crows would start taking pleasure in poking the new twigs into the pile. The nest would grow as an interlocked mass of twigs.
The pattern I see is like this: Crow is on a branch and feels good by walking down it. At a certain point it feels good at taking a small twig that is now available. Crow flies away proudly and after a while drops the twig, often at a nesting site. Crow starts taking pleasure in the new circumstance of the growing twig pile of poking twig into the pile rather than just dropping. Process continues until a nest is ready for eggs.
Of course this is conjecture on my part. I have no idea how it might be tested. How could I measure pleasure in a crow? But hey - how would someone else measure pleasure in me?
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.