#kaeli swift

[sayjoisme84]

@corvidresearch on TikTok

It’s that time of year again. How to I’d a crew fledgling and what to do.

Mostly leave it alone.

[cerebrodigital]

Los cuervos, conocidos por su plumaje negro y su característico graznido, son mucho más que simples aves ruidosas. Un estudio publicado en ScienceDirect, por la investigadora Kaeli Swift, ha demostrado que estos animales realizan funerales cuando uno de sus congéneres fallece, un comportamiento que ha despertado el interés de la comunidad científica.

Más sobre esta investigación haciendo click en el enlace:

[zomboidamsel]

! crows have mortuary rituals! they gather around the corpse of a dead crow and they make loud alarming noises. !

that was later on discovered to be a way for crows to alarm each other’s from danger, ravens can infact remember the faces of whom they consider a threat!

the researcher kaeli swift run an interesting experiment on crows! in fact, she visited a park and threw peanuts to the birds, which the crows consumed, with no worry.

later on, she visited the park again, but this time she was wearing a latex mask and wig to cover her face, and she brought a taxidermy dead crow as well, holding it in her hands, in a innocent, not threatening way.

the first crow that saw her, gave the alarm to the other ravens, whom followed and started making loud noise. this “storm noise” was called by the researcher, “crow’s funeral”.

a week later, she came back not wearing any mask nor holding any bird, bringing peanuts. this time the crows were careful and cautious, just like they learnt there could be danger by the previous encounter; but in the end, peanuts were accepted and eaten by crows anyway.

the day after, she wore the mask again, with no bird in her hands, the crows gathered and started making loud noise! they recognized her as threat.

interestingly, the fear of a potentially deadly situation does not abandon the crows; in fact, even after six weeks, more than a third of the 65 pairs of crows present continued to behave in that way.

[eventcharts]

Watch a Problem-Solving Raven Outsmart a Trash Can

Ravens are among the world's most intelligent birds and have been known to use logical thinking to successfully forage for food.

Moon (food, habits) conjunct Okyrhoe (acute logic skills, promotes principles of discernment and conscious life skills) sextile Great Attractor (14 sa 12'8").

Video taken in Haines, Alaska, shows one clever raven unlocking a weighted trash bin. The bird can be seen fastening its beak under clasps to unlock the lid, knocking it to the ground. It then rummages through the trash, picking out bits and pieces of cardboard and plastic, likely searching for scraps of food.

The trash-pillaging raven was caught on camera by Randa Szymanski and her husband, who initially assumed their garbage bin was getting knocked over by bears. Despite the garbage lid clasps and a heavy rock on the lid, ravens are regularly able to dig through their trash.

According to Szymanski, the ravens in her home of Southeast Alaska are notoriously “smart and fearless” and known by the Tlingit natives as tricksters.

In addition to their dumpster-diving antics, she has observed them pestering bald eagles and stealing food from the back of open pick-up trucks. One especially clever incident involved them stealing a dozen eggs from the back of a car, one-by-one.

“They flipped open the carton and took one egg at a time to their nest nearby. They had them all by the time the owner of the truck came back out,” said Szymanski.

Ravens are notoriously intelligent. They, along with crows and magpies, belong to a family of birds called corvids. Some studies have shown that corvids, despite having significantly smaller brains, are intellectually comparable to chimpanzees.

“These aren’t animals that have adapted to living with people, these are animals that have figured out how to exploit people,” says Kaeli Swift, a PhD candidate at the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington.

Swift notes that where the raven in the video stands on the trashcan is a natural perch, thus making it difficult to discern whether its ability to release the locks and knock the lid of the bin was intentional or an accident.

Swift also noted that the aggression toward bald eagles described by Szymanski is what’s known as a mobbing behavior intended to evict predators, such as eagles, from the area. (This behavior is often responsible for the “animals riding animals” Internet phenom.)

“When an individual sees a predator, it produces an alarm call that attracts other birds in the area,” says Swift. The birds then “mob” predators, effectively warding them off.

Logical Thinkers

One cognitive test, designed by ornithologist Bernd Heinrich, suggests ravens are highly capable of logical thinking.

Tying a piece of meat to a string and dangling it from a tree branch, Heinrich observed how ravens pulled the meat up. Using their beaks, the ravens inched the string closer to their claws, which they used to create loops around their talons, shortening the string and successfully obtaining their reward.

In video footage of the experiment, Heinrich notes that the birds weren’t trained and could not have been acting on evolutionary instinct because the test created a situation that would not have naturally occurred in the wild. He believes this suggests the birds were acting intentionally and logically.

The biological reason for corvid intelligence was first discovered in the 1960s by a neurologist named Stanley Cobb. Birds lack an elaborate cerebral cortex, the part of the brain in mammals responsible for many cognitive functions such as thought, language, memory, and consciousness.

Instead, their biological key to success lies in a section of their forebrain called the hyperstriatum, which allows them to perform similar tasks.

A 2016 study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offered further insight into how corvids perform functions similar to apes and chimps using only their little walnut-sized brains. Researchers at Charles University in Prague discovered these specific types of birds have an exceptionally dense amount of neurons in their forebrains, possessing equal and sometimes greater amounts of neurons than monkeys.

One Hitchcock-like line from the study’s authors revealed that because of this neuron density, “Avian brains thus have the potential to provide much higher ‘cognitive power’ per unit mass than do mammalian brains.”

Minor planet keywords developed by Philip Sedgwick, used with permission http://philipsedgwick.com/

Centaur, TNO & Asteroid Aspectarian http://serennu.com/astrology/aspectarians.php

[aquilathefighter]

Hey look! It's me, the joke spoiler here to spoil all the fun!

There's not a real scientific difference between a crow and a raven! Generally, birds with raven in their common name are larger, have croakier voices, and have diamond shaped tails--but these names aren't given by any particular criteria.

Birds in genus Corax, our dear friends Crow and Raven, are entirely unexceptional in their number of primary feathers. They have the very typical 9 on each wing, for a total of 18.

Anyone who would like to know more about corvids should check out Dr. Kaeli Swift's blog!

Here's her post about this same meme that gets passed around.

[crowcorvid]

if anyone is looking for something cool to read, I’m a big fan of Kaeli Swift’s site https://corvidresearch.blog/ and her Instagram and Twitter. She is an incredible scientist and her Instagram is really good for people especially those of us who aren’t scientists to learn more without feeling lost. She also has a game where she’ll post a picture of a bird and viewers get to guess whether it’s a crow or not, which is both fun and really helps with learning to identify birds. anyway can’t recommend enough!

[thanatophobia-thoughts]

Looking at how animals understand death, and how they grieve, has naturally been interesting to me in this time. 

While I question how much they understand their own mortality, it is obvious they understand something about death. This is shown in this video through crows, and how not only do they investigate the scene where one of their own is dead, but perform something that could be considered a funeral, or at least a kind of parting/mourning ritual. 

[hideousgourd]

[arsonalice]

I don’t wanna geek out here, but I had to do some kind of essay in uni about an animal of my choice. I saw a few ted talks on the intelligence of corvids and immediately chose them as my topic. And let me tell you how cool they are.

They can have the same level of intelligence as a 7-year-old which is pretty huge for an animal with that small of a brain. That is because their brain can fit in neurons more effectively than it is the case in mammals. This is also the case in parrots btw, except that corvids (specifically crows and ravens and magpies) are often more intelligent than some parrot species.

Like parrots, they can also learn to speak (please look up some videos on this because it is both scarily clear and fascinating). The most fascinating thing (in my opinion) is how they learn to use and make (!!!) tools to get stuff they want.

They can recognise peoples’ faces which is the reason you’ve probably heard of crows bringing humans gifts or attacking people that have hurt them.

I could probably write a lot more on this because they are such fascinating animals albeit often seen as a nuisance, but I would probably just end up writing a whole new essay on this.

But yeah, corvids are intelligent little fuckers

If you want to watch the Ted Talks look for Joshua Klein, John Marzluff, and Dr. Kaeli Swift

I love corvids. Please share with me your favourite corvids

[doodlebeeberry]

Wish there was crow or no on tumblr :/

[fossore]

Crows are smart and great, but this crow is not particularly helping the hedgehog

It’s pushing it across, but it’s also the reason it’s stopping (every time the crow goes near the hedgehog’s head it balls up and stops)

A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.

[lunarwildrose]

My 16th Crow Goblin, a girl, was born today, on the first day of Summer! 🌞

I have also been meaning to upload pics from Animal Crossing for my other daughter's bday on the first day of Spring. 🌷

🖤🐦‍⬛×🕊🤍

Baby Crow pic by Kaeli Swift, found via Google Images. Thankyou! ♡

[violentdesires]

Kaelie Morais ( Camila Queiroz ) is missing their first love. Have you seen them in our realm? Rumor has it that they are a dead-ringer for Lucien Laviscount ( Can Yaman, Henry Golding, Theo James, Joseph Morgan, UTD ) and they are a 750+ year old Unseelie / Demon. You can read more about the connection here and find some extra information in this post.

HEADCANONS 

While Kaelie is slowly getting her memories back, she does everything in her power to block them out. Remembering her past life is one of the very few things that truly scare her and while a part of her understands where her ex partner is coming from, there is another part of her that believes he shouldn’t have resurrected her - or anyone else, for that matter. The whole ordeal is a secret between the two of them, not even her family knows and she would prefer to keep it that way. Things are complicated enough, no? He would be aware that her pregnancy was far from planned and that she did not have much of a say in her betrothal either, but Kaelie made it clear that her trust issues when it comes to this character are quite severe. She cannot understand why he did not reveal the truth as soon as he found her - even though she can’t claim that it would have made much of a difference. A part of her wants to keep him in her life, but there is another part of her that feels like it can’t work out. Can you really be friends with someone you share such a deep history with? But can either one of them truly stand not seeing each other at all? The thought of altering her memories to forget again certainly crossed her mind - a fact that she did not reveal to anyone else.

PLAYLIST

Exile - Taylor Swift, Bon Iver. Happy Ending - Mika. Hedonism - Skunk Anansie. Speeding Cars - Walking On Cars. Love Me Again - John Newman.

( psd + template )

[everythingfox]

“Here it is just existing. It doesn’t need to do anything more than that to be among the most incredible things I’ve ever seen.”

🎥: Kaeli Swift

[not-poignant]

🌻!!

Oooo, your name is pretty inspirational actually.

I fucking love Corvids. I have since I was a teenager. The word ‘raven’ is in my surname (though most people don’t know my legal surname and think ‘Ravenari’ is my surname lol), and it’s on the coat of arms of our family (either black or white ravens, which is pretty badass). I bought Bernd Heinrich’s Mind of the Raven when I was about 17 years old, and have been collecting books on Corvids and Corvid ethology (animal behaviour) ever since.

I’m a big fan of Kaeli Swift on Twitter, who is a Corvid ornithologist and has done amazing work specifically on like, death and Corvids in particular. (She’s also got a really good episode on the Ologies podcast).

I’ve drawn Corvids way more times than I care to admit, lmao.

As an example! One of the things that actually annoys me most in Perth is that everyone calls our ravens ‘crows’ and they’re not crows! They’re ravens! Specifically Corvus coronoides, the Australian raven. They have white eyes as adults and I adore them.

[tracle0]

hey hello hi SO here's the deal I legit adore all your bird facts and your tag rambles n whenever I see them I'm like "!!!!!!" so I wanted to ask you a Bird Question so I get to hear more rambles but I don't know enough about birds to ask anything that sounds smart SO if this is not a weird request maybe could I please have some words about... 1) a Weird Bird, 2) a Cool Bird and 3) a bird you would most like to be bros with. sorry if this is a super weird ask ahaha ok cya later have a good day

HI HELLO you actually read those??? omg that very much makes me v happy to hear I just like to throw up knowledge into the tags and then assume no-one is gonna ever observe it. 

Wowza. Secret fan right here :D

Okay okay birds. Biiiirds. I gotchya man. Lots of my college project has been looking into birds. I know birds. 

However, I do live in England where there aren’t many weird birds. Our birds are kinda tame. I guess the tiny birds are kinda weird. I’ll give you some tiny bird facts. 

European robins are very shy little birds, very wary and cautious around people in most of Europe. Here is one of them;

Little fat lad. In most of Europe, v shy. However! In England, they are super bold. Very daring. Very commonly seen in gardens and allotments, waiting for gardeners to finish digging at a patch to go rummaging for bugs and other things they can eat. This is because in England, it’s considered bad luck to kill robins (don’t ask why I couldn’t find out) so they’re v safe here. 

They were called Robin Red Breast for a while, due to... red. Postmen in Victorian England also wore red around winter time, as part of their uniform, so a popular nickname for postmen in winter was Robin Red Breast. It became a sign of Christmas coming, hence why robins are so strongly associated with Christmas despite being year-round visitors. The last bit of their name was dropped but the sentiment remains. 

Other small bird facts; Goldfinches! V pretty birds. Here’s a picture

Wow look at that bird, so pretty! So, the deal with goldfinches was that they have super sweet song. I can hear one outside right now, actually, v tuneful, v recognisable songbirds. As a result, for a lot of history, goldfinches have been caught to keep as cage birds, to sing away and make rich lords and ladies houses sound nice. Rude practise. 

People think their population has been declining and blame the magpie. You’re Australian so maybe you’re like ‘reeee magpie’ (although my brain is telling me you don’t hate them and think they’re bros correct me if I’m wrong) but here magpies are mostly disliked because of their habit of taking from nests - a behaviour common to many corvids (more on that later). However! There have been lots of studies into this, and it was found that areas with higher magpie populations had no correlation to the number of songbird deaths in the area. Almost like... industrialisation and farming are driving them out of their area. 

These are long rambles. There are two info-splurges on tiny birds. Let’s move on to a cool bird, the swift! The common swift. Just to be clear.

I fucking adore swifts. Every year I wait eagerly for May to roll around so they return to England again. They are delightful birds, even if their screams are a bit unnerving. In Medieval times, people used to think their screams were the screams of damned souls in hell, and that when swifts vanished during the winter, they were buried in the mud to sleep, a belief held due to their nest-building habits of dried mud being the main item used to build nests.

Swifts barely ever land!! The only exception to this is to feed their chicks. When they’re little chicks, they do press-ups with their wings to build up wing muscles, Once they leave the nest, they keep flying for most of their life, only stopping when THEY have chicks!!! They eat, sleep and mate on the wing!!! Wild man!! 

As said before in the tags that I think you read, they rarely fly in the rain when in England/Europe - they fly to eat the bugs, and the bugs hide when it rains, so they just.... fly around the storm. They’re the only bird to actually do this. Unrelated but also neat, they’re one of the oldest species of birds, and whilst they look like swallows and house martins, they’re most closesly related to the hummingbird!!!

Swifts have the fastest level flying speed of 69mph. This means that it has the fastest speed it achieves by itself - the fastest bird of all is the peregrine falcon with its dive breaking speeds of 240mph!! That’s wild. They also keep flying for the longest, as said, and fly the furthest, from Africa to Europe and back again every year. One swift was recorded flying 4 million miles in its life - the same as travelling to the moon and back 8 times!!! Crazy. Insane. I love swifts. 

Bird I would most like to be bros with is the crow 100% because. Hello. Have we met. I love crows. Carrion crows, because they’re the crow we have here the most. 

There they are!!! V pretty. I love them. So much. 

So! Carrion crows often get a bad wrap for a variety of reasons, mostly history based, which is what I was actually exploring in the funky crow comic I’ve been doing for college work. I will say I blame Christianity and Alfred Fucking Hitchcock for their demonisation the most. They’re actually bros, being able to recognise human faces, reward those who are nice to it and punish those who are cruel. They can also tell other crows which humans are good and bad.

As said previously, a lot of corvids attack nests and eat eggs or young of other birds. I can’t defend this much - it’s what corvids do. Hell, the local crow in our area recently attacked the jackdaw nest across the road. It happens. C’est la vie. They do this because they’re scavengers, opportunistic, eating anything and everything they can, which is most likely how they’ve adapted so well to the huge industrial boom and in so many different places around the world!

In Japan, the Kanji for ‘crow’ is the same as the Kanji for ‘bird’, except the bit that symbolises the eye is removed. This is because crows, being all black with beady black eyes, look like they don’t have eyes from a distance. I learnt that from Persona 5. 

Their brains are huge!! Smart boyos!!! Hell, in terms of brain to body mass, their brains are bigger than apes!!! They’re insanely good at problem solving, with wild crows who were kept in captivity for short periods for testing being able to solve multi-step problems (some problems being 8 steps long!) for food!!! They’ve also been seen playing around with each other and the environment, something that had only been seen in apes and other high-intelligence and social creatures. They recognise their reflection. They have been observed making tools in the wild. They are very smart. 

Crows have really interesting routines and behaviours they follow regarding death - when finding a dead crow, they sound the alarm, and all swarm around the body, working together to try and figure out how it died and if it’s a threat to all of them. Sometimes they lay things on the dead crow, which some believe is similar to burying. If you’re interested in this, Kaeli Swift is a good name to look into - she specialises in corvid behaviour. 

My head is now going blank with crow facts but I think there are more. Support your local corvid nerd. Support your local bird nerd! Didn’t know I had so many facts rattling in my head. 

This uhhhh got long. If you got to the end, thumbs up 10/10 appreciate. Hope you have a top tier day :D