Signal Thief

Do corvids really nick shiny things?

Magpies take the blame, and mostly they’ve been framed. In 2014 researchers at the University of Exeter set shiny objects and dull ones beside piles of food and settled in to watch the heist. There wasn’t one. The magpies were wary of everything new, and in 64 feeding trials they touched a shiny object twice, a silver ring both times, and dropped it at once, as if it were hot. The thieving magpie seems to come from what people happen to notice, which means the birds have been doing time for a crime they were too nervous to commit.

Ravens are another matter, and if you run anything with a network attached they should worry you a great deal more. In a 2017 study in Science, Can Kabadayi and Mathias Osvath taught five captive ravens to swap a token with a human for food. Given a tray of decoys, the birds picked out the right token and saved it for a trade offered later, and they got it right more than nine times in ten. That is a better hit rate than any product roadmap you have ever been shown, from five birds who were never promised equity.

So look again at the raven on this shirt. It has the chip, it has the high ground on a snapped and rusting aerial, and it knows exactly what the chip is worth. It will sit up there, saving it, until somebody offers a better trade. Whoever left a chip lying about on a mast nobody has looked at in years is in no position to haggle.

Evidence: “The thieving magpie”? University of Exeter, 2014, Ravens parallel great apes in their planning abilities, Lund University, 2017