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    Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans
    Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans
    Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans
    Audiobook8 hours

    Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans

    Written by Tony Angell and John Marzluff

    Narrated by Danny Campbell

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    New research indicates that crows are among the brightest animals in the world. And professor of Wildlife Science at the University of Washington John Marzluff has done some of the most extraordinary research on crows, which has been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, and the Chicago Tribune, as well as on NPR and PBS. Now he teams up with artist and fellow naturalist Tony Angell to offer an in-depth look at these incredible creatures-in a book that is brimming with surprises.Redefining the notion of "bird brain," crows and ravens are often called feathered apes because of their clever tool-making and their ability to respond to environmental challenges, including those posed by humans. Indeed, their long lives, social habits, and large complex brains allow them to observe and learn from us and our social gatherings. Their marvelous brains allow crows to think, plan, and reconsider their actions. In these and other enthralling revelations, Marzluff and Angell portray creatures that are nothing short of amazing: they play, bestow gifts on people who help or feed them, use cars as nutcrackers, seek revenge on animals that harass them, are tricksters that lure birds to their deaths, and dream. The authors marvel at crows' behavior that we humans would find strangely familiar, from delinquency and risk taking to passion and frolic. A testament to years of painstaking research, this riveting work is a thrilling look at one of nature's most wondrous creatures.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 5, 2012
    ISBN9781452677712
    Author

    Tony Angell

    Tony Angell has authored and/or illustrated a dozen award-winning books related to natural history.

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    Reviews for Gifts of the Crow

    3.5/5

    57 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A wonderful book about some wonderful creatures. Lots of pretty drawings. Great stories about crow behavior and its similarities with our own behavior. I skipped over some of the nitty gritty specifics on corvid brain structures.
    • 4/5
      An absolute must-read for anyone who enjoys birds. Marzluff does a great job of telling very entertaining stories of corvid behavior while also explaining the anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry behind the behavior. I've always loved crows and known they were smart, but some of the behavior detailed in this book blew me away. I need a crow friend. Immediately.
    • 3/5
      This is pretty dry neurobiology. Very educational, very scientific yet geared for the layperson, but a little too dense for an audiobook.
    • 2/5
      This was rather disappointing. A fair number of anecdotes, none of them surprising if you've read news articles about crows. Very little description of the science of studying crow intelligence. Bernd Heinrich's "Mind of the Raven" is vastly superior, being basically a series of experiments (although often inconclusive ones). This has only a couple descriptions of experiments, and they were mostly not particularly novel or interesting. For example, they describe showing crows different images, then anesthetizing them and putting them through a PET scanner. Then they over-interpret the results. Basically, it goes from "we have no idea how crows do this, but it must be somewhere in their brain" to "we have no idea how crows do this, but it might be related to these [large and vaguely defined] areas of the brain." So what? The book is also overwritten, and I personally would have preferred photographs to the sketches. One interesting experiment they do is to capture ravens while wearing a mask, and then for the next five years continue to wear the mask, or give it to undergrads to wear, around campus. The ravens passed the identity of the "bad guy" down and kept harassing him, in fact in larger and larger groups, and even when the mask was worn upside-down. > Not only was the crows' hatred of the caveman persistent, it was getting worse with time. In the five years since we trapped on campus, the number of birds scolding the caveman on a typical walk has increased threefold. And the vast majority of those who berate the Neanderthal were never even touched by him
    • 2/5
      Oddly enough I'm in the perfect position to "eat crow" as the saying goes. I saw a number of reviews that suggested this book was uneven, that there was too much science, as one person put it, and I smugly laughed it off. I read a lot of science and I'm rarely put off by complexities.

      Yeah this time? Not so much. The critics were spot on and I'm sorry I doubted them. The book is uneven with hunks of information about the neurobiology of crows and other corvids, none of which seems to be particularly well integrated into the narrative. It was so scattered that I only got through four chapters before I bailed.

      The thing is that the folks who said this wasn't good scientific writing were spot on. It's by turns inaccessible and lightly anecdotal, but solid behavioral information that might have tied those two opposite modes of inquiry together seemed to be lacking.

      I was wrong to dismiss the naysayers, and I admit it.

      Apropos of the audiobook quality, it's good as is the narrator. It's the material that's rather dull and disappointing.
    • 3/5
      I have always noticed crows doing interesting things so this book is right down my alley. Super fun learning more about their zany ways. I admit I skimmed over the brain diagrams but now carry peanuts in my car to toss as snacks. They eat them but seem to prefer french fries.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating and frequently entertaining look at the astonishing intelligence and emotional range of crows and other corvids. A good mix of hard science and anecdotes.