> [A]nting is..where birds rub insects, usually ants, on their feathers and skin.
> Some birds will sit still on an anthill and patiently allow the creatures to crawl freely through their feathers. At other times they have been seen to pick the ants up with their beaks and rub themselves with the tiny insects.
> Sensing a threat, the ants shoot a spray of formic acid from their abdomens or anal glands which gets absorbed into the bird's body and acts as a natural insecticide.
> ..A widely held theory..maintains that birds use the ants to soothe irritated skin during periods of heavy feather molting, while another theory suggests it controls parasites which live in the bird's plumage.
I’m inclined to think it’s akin to recreational drug usage in humans.
Crows are supposedly more intelligent/aware than other animals, and with awareness comes existential dread or whatever you want to call it.
Lots of humans use drugs to alleviate this and I think it’s plausible that crows do something similar. Hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a more uplifting reason.
Crows definitely get drunk, on purpose, by eating rotten fruit & berries, so this is plausible - although formic acid to the skin seems less fun - but then I'm not a crow.
I’m on mobile so I can’t provide you with a good quality reply with sources, but we are taught in medical school that alcohol calories are not metabolized the same way as other nutrition.
In a very back of the envelope kind of way, here’s why: Alcohol is metabolized not as nutrition but as poison, and while yes, ethanol is very calorific, the calories derived from are lost (mostly) as heat. And, because of the metabolic pathways utilized, other important substances required by cells are depleted (products of the Pentose Phosphate Pathway - PPP) in the quest to detoxify alcohol. Running the PPP is generally an energy intense process, so you’re at a net loss when al said and done. This can partly help explain why chronic alcoholics are not overweight. This is excluding the calorie debt owed to repairing cell damage from the cytotoxic effects of alcohol.
If anyone’s interested, I can recommend some Biochemistry textbooks for a deep dive.
EDIT: Forgot to mention, partly thanks to the metabolic reasons, alcohol results in hypoglycemia, so it is unlikely that the bird would experience feelings of satiety after imbibing.
> Being drunk as a bird wouldn't seem to be a good idea from a survival point of view ...
Being drunk as a human is also not a good idea from a survival point of view given how often drunk people kill themselves doing stupid things.
Crows engage in play and form complex plans that show they understand that actions have consequences so it doesn't seem unreasonable that they might occasionally decide to get drunk and roll around on the floor screaming.
In that case, I’m inclined to think it serves one of the utilitarian functions that they mention, as it seems unlikely that all those species would have crow-level intelligence.
Yeah there's an entire BBC doc segment about this in the series 'weird nature'. I think the only one that freaked me out really was how drunk bees get detected by 'bouncer' bees at the hive who rip their wings and limbs off if they come back too wasted
Wait, this is the first I’ve ever heard of drugs being used to alleviate existential dread. I’ve never experienced or understood existential dread, so maybe that is why this seems strange to me, but do you have any sources about your assertion?
Not really, aside from personal experience/observation. Not sure what type of source there would be; perhaps a survey/study of self-reported reasons for drug use?
Surely you’ve heard of drug/alcohol abuse referred to as an “escape”, no? Existential dread/angst is just another thing to try to escape from.
Outsider theory? Not really, we use them in scientific studies studying the evolution of intelligence all the time. I think I remember hearing last that they're even capable of metacognition (thinking of thought itself)
I live in a place where I get to
witness epic battles between a murder of crows and a colony of seagulls on a daily basis this time of the year. The seagulls are nesting on the roofs of nearby houses. The crows are trying to eat the seagull hatchlings.
It's kind of fascinating to watch. It seems like the crows are trying new strategies every new day. The much larger seagulls are wasting lots of energy in a kinda stupid way, the crows are chilling most of the time.
i got to witness a murder of crow harassing 2 bald eagles until the eagles just gave up and left. we’re not even talking a lot. There were maybe 6-7 crows.
The theory I heard is the bald eagle(s) could easily take them on but they risk injury and the crows will try to mess them up. So the eagles just don’t risk it and move on +
hunt things that don’t fight back (like rabbits).
also, I can swear that crows taunt my dog who does not like them and will bark/try to catch them. it’s like watching a comedy show with the crows doing something to provoke the dog and literally “laughing” afterwards.
The phenomenon of multiple prey animals swarming larger predators to drive them off is known as mobbing.[0] Crows seem to do it quite readily. Very cool that you got to see it!
Almost everyday a barn owl is being mobbed by crows. This owl then sits on our bathroom window because it feels safe there. I want to teach these crows lesson for their lifetime
The strangest part of this to me is that I've never once had this happen in the Willingdon Park office park near Brentwood in Burnaby. It is absolutely covered with crows overnight, at all times of the year.[1]
But the one time I walked down the wrong sidewalk in Point Grey (so Vancouver 'proper') during springtime, the back of my head gets smacked.
[1] Perhaps the Burnaby/Willingdon crows consider the absurd amounts of crow shit on cars, sidewalks, buildings, etc. to be adequate warning? The stench after a rain is... eugh.
I've had this happen a lot by gulls. Every spring they nest at various rooftops, and anyone walking within 50 yards of the house gets swooped repeatedly.
The eagles are somewhat less maneuverable- crows are very nimble flyers. I just saw a crow on my walk today land backwards in the wind. They can avoid the claws and beak... Sort of like a monkey harassing a tiger. They'll actually pull feathers off the eagle. Every now and then the eagles pull some crazy moves though to get away, they'll tilt sideways and fall. It's like a move you might see in fighter jet dogfights.
Around here harriers also get harassed by the crows.
I let my dog work on his own problems. More seriously, those feathered devils will remember it and you’ll going to be next when it comes to harassment.
On a daily basis, I see mockingbirds chasing off crows. Sometimes they come out of a tree, so I assume those scenarios usually involve crows messing with nests. Other times mockingbirds will chase off crows as they're apparently passing through. Never seen a crow fight back, and they fly away (sometimes not far) as if they're saying, Alright, alright, I'm going. Typically, it's just a single mockingbird, so it's not as though the crow is being overwhelmed, but, like the eagle in your example, it's probably just not worth the energy/potential injury.
We have a lot of blue jays, too, and even though they're notoriously territorial, I can't remember seeing a blue jay/crow altercation. Maybe their reputation precedes them? I don't have any real guesses.
Same here, except I haven't seen crows stealing eggs. We've observed a herring gull mother protecting her eggs until they've hatched. We never saw her leaving the nest. At most we've observed other seagulls being chased away by the partner.
There are 2 common seagulls here who get very excited sometimes. They fly around and make short calls in sync with eachother. Last week I saw them chasing a hooded crow around just outside my window, but I'm kinda unsure if it's play since I've seen them sit relatively close to each other without caring.
But for some very strange reason, one of the hooded crow seems to HATE me. If I walk down the street here he'll follow and scream at me. He'll sometimes sit outside my window from afar and watch me too. He'll follow me as far as his territory goes (around 300 meters in diameter)
It's the strangest thing that's ever happened to me. It's like I did something really bad to him.
I've gone out to see him a few times out of curiosity. I tried giving him food and he does take it eventually, but it doesn't seem like that's what he's there for.
Geese have an angry-defending-the-nest mode and an eating-food mode that are mutually exclusive.
Eating food overrides, which means with just a small handful of goose food you can wander up to a nest and do whatever you like without being threatened by mother goose.
Beware the moment the food runs out, defend-the-nest mode is reenabled and you'll get viciously attacked.
Kinda odd - I guess no predators think to make use of this by bringing some food!
They are thought to have come from little Australian songbirds who came on hard times like everything else when
their environment went full desert on them, unlike the other nice birds that accepted their doom they leveled up and started eating their neighbors eggs for extra protein and fewer competitors it has been a remarkable successful strategy and they (like us) took it on the road and spread around the globe
Is there a term for this kind of internet comment section correction? Like "it's an aptronym, not nominative determinism", or "it's an initialism, not an acronym".
(I'm not saying this to be snarky towards you or anything like that, and I personally appreciate seeing such corrections. Genuinely just curious if there's a term for this specific sort of thing, since it's common on HN and reddit.)
Watching a lot of science/astronomy related content on YouTube I've noticed that on most of the english-speaking channels the name ist pronounce wrongly (schwarz-child, instead of schwarz-chilled)
PBS spacetime does it right though.
Schild means shield btw. I had a friend with a schild name and for the longest time pronounced it "child" without them correcting me. I felt so embarrassed when I realized it means shield.
Rothschild means "red shield", for anyone curious.
The full etymology:
>The name is derived from the German zum rothen Schild (with the old spelling "th"), meaning "at the red shield", in reference to the house where the family lived for many generations (in those days houses were designated not by numbers but by signs displaying different symbols or colours).
I laughed at the fictional dentist supposedly named "Crentist" in the Office, then I remembered the largest scam in recent history was by Bernie Madoff.
He must have been affiliated with the brokerage firm Duewee, Cheatem & Howe...
Took a series 7 course [stockbroker license] few years back, I remember that was the teachers goto example firm.
Greico...John Thomas... fun times, then I realized I have a soul that prevents me from scamming people out of their last cent just to make a payment on a Benz or pay for weekly supply of hookers and cocaine...
Ah, yes, the Car Talk show’s preferred firm! They retained Hugh Louis Dewey as their Chief Legal Counsel. The full staff list is linked below. And just because I can’t help giving a small sample, here are there defense lawyers:
Defense Attorney Justin Volk V
Defense Attorney II Heronimus B. Blind
Defense Attorney III Donnatella Dicoppas
Defense Attorney IV Gil T. Azell
In Austin, TX, there's a urologist famously named Richard Chopp, and his colleagues at the same clinic all have similarly relevant names, like Stephen Hardeman.
Pre-WFH, there were several groups of crows near my office covering distinct territories around my building. I made a habit of feeding and interacting with a few of these groups, every day for several months. Here are my experiences:
* I did indeed see a crow "anting" one time, and was initially as bewildered as the photographer in TFA. Surprisingly I was able to get much closer to the bird than they normally allow, but stepped back as soon as I saw it wasn't actually in distress.
* The best way to get close to a crow is to back up towards it; they are extremely wary of eye contact and will immediately become alert if you look at them or move towards them with your body facing forward. Over time, I used this method to get close to them and demonstrate that I wasn't a threat. I "trained" the crows to recognize that if they let me get close, I'll drop some food for them. After a while you don't have to do the backwards shimmy, but it's a good default strategy for approaching naturally skittish creatures.
* If you feed crows in exactly the same place every day, they will recognize you and fly to the "feeding spot". Crows pay very close attention to your movements and behaviors, and like most animals will try to develop a mental model to figure out when you're going to feed them. If presented with consistent causal behaviors, the birds will essentially train themselves.
* Crows are very sensitive to changes in appearance and behavior. I switched jackets one day and was met with immediate suspicion.
* My most fruitful experiment was right before the lockdown. I would stand in a specific ___location for a little while and watch the birds (watching them from a distance piques their curiosity and alertness to you). With them watching, I would pretend to plant food somewhere nearby and then move away. The crows would fly over, and I would immediately reward them. After a few weeks of this, I began gesturing towards nearby objects with my hand, and the birds would investigate the object immediately after I move away. After consistently rewarding this behavior, I was able to advance to "pointing to a semi-nearby object with my arm". One crow eventually figured out how to fly to the object I was pointing at, and I did a few successful tests to make sure the crow would fly specifically to the object I was pointing at, and not at some other nearby object. I have yet to train them to land on distant objects, but I'm hopeful!
* Crows like pistachios (they have multiple techniques for cracking the shell), and love cashews and peanuts (unsalted are best for the birds). They'll almost always opt for the "more convenient" snack, especially when they're competing with other crows. I try to reward the "bravest" crows first, by slowly moving away from the food pile until one crow moves in. Like other animals, crows also learn by observing the reward loop from a distance, and you can use this to get a large number of them to trust you.
* Crows are very curious when they feel safe, and it is mutually entertaining to set up unusual scenarios (such as hiding food inside or under tricky objects, like empty water bottles or closed paper containers).
Someone posted years ago here about feeding crows in a local park that they rode by daily on their bike, and how for months after they stopped feeding them they were occasionally met by a phalanx of crows who flew alongside them for a while as they rode.
That has been on my bucket list ever since. Not a whole phalanx, but I would like to have a crow friend like Patera Silk did. They migrate through my area in midwinter, so I will have to get some unsalted nuts this year (and the next, and the one after that…)
My crows have done this sometimes when I'm on my bike! Although they'll usually only follow alongside me as far as their territory extends, about the length of a parking lot. Not quite a phalanx either, just a bird or two.
I have noticed crows land on the ant hills on my property but never let me get close enough to get a picture. I am also on Vancouver Island. I carry a bag of unshelled peanuts in my car and when I see a crow toss one. They love peanuts and are very intelligent animals.
That was weird. Also TIL that English of course has a specific word for a bunch of crows: a murder of crows [1]. As a non-native user of the language, that was ... surprising.
In English, collective nouns for a group of (usually animals) are full of surprises and often sound quite creative. A wake of vultures, a rave of ravens, a rookery of seals, and so on.
There's also a standard name for such nouns in aggregate; "terms of venery".
"Venery" in this context means hunting game animals, a usage that dates back to the late Middle Ages. Terms of venery are the conventional nouns used to designate collections of game animals.
They're colorful, as you already know. There are a bunch of them that we've inherited from the late Middle Ages.
On the other hand, there are a bunch more of them with more recent origin, presumably because amusement with the inherited ones has motivated lovers of words to coin new ones.
James Lipton wrote a book entitled An Exaltation of Larks collecting a lot of terms of venery, both ancient and modern. If you are amused by "a murder of crows" and "a parliament of owls" then you'd probably like the book.
I grew up on this island where this photo was taken, crows and especially their huge cousins the ravens were some of the coolest creatures on two wings around. I remember one of them coming up to a table where me and my brother were playing uno and the bird just brazenly came up to us and stole one of the cards, we were bugging out because we had borrowed the set from a friend
and unfortunately i have a photo of some fat naked dude sitting on an anthill smiling scratching his beard covered in ants so this behaviour isn't really restricted to crows. it's like a thing in Finland or something. It is the first result for 'man sitting on ants' in google image search but it's blurred out and you have to click through to see
My favorite, albeit not that interesting crow story...
Southwestern Indiana has some ecosystems that are unusual for the state, including a bald cypress swamp remnant. I visited Hovey Lake near that swamp two consecutive early mornings, and both days I heard an unusual (to me) bird call right at sunrise that I was able to identify as a fish crow.
We don't have typically have fish crows elsewhere in the state, not even sure they're common at Hovey Lake, so I have no idea whether this sunrise behavior is common, but I did find a similar story from much further south.
TFA mentions anting "is a rare occurrence". While I didn't know what the birds were doing until now this happen semi-regularly on my neighbor's front lawn just across the street. There are two specific spots they like. I've always assumed they were sunbathing or too hot.
I saw this the other day. A crow lying in a ploughed field with its wings spread out on the ground. Like in the photo, another crow was was watching. I just thought "huh" and carried on with my run. I'll be sure to document next time.
A non sequitur but, I once read on Nextdoor (where I get most of my life hacks) that if you have a problem with crows hanging around in your backyard, just place an upside down bowl out there and problem solved.
Men, most who don't wear cosmetics, don't spontaneously stick their faces against ant hills. The women who don't wear cosmetics, either, don't seem to cover their faces in ants.
I was answering this comment, "Before cosmetics were available, some people stuck their face to an ants nest, I think the theory was that that could help peeling dead skin," which was not about crow's behaviour - either by nurture or nature.
I can't believe that people are actually taking that comment from the parent seriously. All I can say is that people tend to believe whatever they read.
Yeah I read that, but I take your point. I'm open minded to it, there's an assortment of weird remedies and therapies that humans have engaged in. People are so obsessed with their own appearance and go to great lengths to improve it... I mean people stick their feet in ponds and let fish eat all the dead skin off to exfoliate their feet.. this is something you can pay money for in a number of tourist cities.
I used to use "anting" to refer to the behavior of cyclists who stand on the pedals and don't sit firmly planted on their seats, as if they have ants in their pants.
And then there were "beeing" which are the cyclists who do the above while also rocking the cycle from left to right -- that's more like bees in their pants.
> Some birds will sit still on an anthill and patiently allow the creatures to crawl freely through their feathers. At other times they have been seen to pick the ants up with their beaks and rub themselves with the tiny insects.
> Sensing a threat, the ants shoot a spray of formic acid from their abdomens or anal glands which gets absorbed into the bird's body and acts as a natural insecticide.
> ..A widely held theory..maintains that birds use the ants to soothe irritated skin during periods of heavy feather molting, while another theory suggests it controls parasites which live in the bird's plumage.