Crows are smart. How smart? Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Their ingenuity never fails to impress.
Last weekend I hosted a boozy dads’ weekend at our cabin up near Pemberton. I don’t mean a weekend for alcoholic dads. I mean it was a boozy weekend for dads, and we played lots of cribbage, charred meat on a BBQ, and talked rubbish into the night.
Just down the lake from our place is the local Mr Fixit, Mark. He lives there all year round, and looks after three cabins for their owners; gardening, fixing stuff that falls down or drops off, and generally taking good care of his little piece of lake side.
One of the more gruesome jobs he does is trap the ubiquitous mice and packrats that get in to the cabins through any crack or hole they can find. Once in, they eat any food that’s not stored properly and play merry rodent hell with electrical wiring and wall insulation.
Our neighbours have the worst problem. Their place straddles a mouse superhighway. The little buggers line up every day at one corner of the basement, patiently taking a number, waiting for their turn to get in and have at the rice krispies. They have so many mice, that Mark now traps them outside as well in a vain attempt to pre-empt the weekly infestation.
Once a trap has been triggered he removes the dead mouse. He leaves them in the fire pit to be incinerated. Turns out he was being carefully watched by the local crow, which now waits on the same branch every morning for the Uber Rodent food delivery truck. Half a minute after Mark has dropped the dead ones on the grass, the crow is there retrieving the furry snacks.
The other day, Mark was interrupted by something mid-corpse removal. He dropped the traps in the grass complete with the mice still wedged under the spring-loaded arms. He was going to finish the job later. By the time he got back, both dead mice were gone. The crow had watched him, figured out how to lift the spring loaded arm without injuring itself, and made off with the mice.
Crows are smart.