Zoe Phillips

“University Of Washington professor learns crows don’t forget a face” — It is not just how the crows remembered, but how the information was transferred to EVERY crow in a 25 mile radius in hours. The story: “To test the birds’ recognition of faces separately from that of clothing, gait and other individual human characteristics, Marzluff and two students wore rubber masks. He designated a caveman mask as ‘dangerous’ and, in a deliberate gesture of civic generosity, a Dick Cheney mask as “neutral.” Researchers in the dangerous mask then trapped and banded seven crows on the university’s campus in Seattle. In the months that followed, the researchers and volunteers donned the masks on campus, this time walking prescribed routes and not bothering crows. The crows had not forgotten. They scolded people in the dangerous mask significantly more than they did before they were trapped, even when the mask was disguised with a hat or worn upside down. The neutral mask provoked little reaction. The effect has not only persisted, but also multiplied over the past two years. Wearing the dangerous mask on one recent walk through campus, Marzluff said, he was scolded by 47 of the 53 crows he encountered, many more than had experienced or witnessed the initial trapping. The researchers hypothesize that crows learn to recognize threatening humans from both parents and others in their flock. ‘Spectacular’ results After their experiments on campus, Marzluff and his students tested the effect with more realistic masks. Using a half-dozen students as models, they enlisted a professional mask maker, then wore the new masks while trapping crows at several sites in and around Seattle. The researchers then gave a mix of neutral and dangerous masks to volunteer observers who, unaware of the masks’ histories, wore them at the trapping sites and recorded the crows’ responses. The reaction to one of the dangerous masks was ‘quite spectacular,’ said one volunteer, Bill Pochmerski, a retired telephone-company manager who lives near Snohomish. ‘The birds were really raucous, screaming persistently,’ he said, ‘and it was clear they weren’t upset about something in general. They were upset with me.’ Again, crows were significantly more likely to scold observers who wore a dangerous mask, and when confronted simultaneously by observers in dangerous and neutral masks, the birds almost unerringly chose to persecute the dangerous face. In downtown Seattle, where most passers-by ignore crows, angry birds nearly touched their human foes. In rural areas, where crows are more likely to be viewed as noisy ‘flying rats’ and shot, the birds expressed their displeasure from a distance. Though Marzluff’s is the first formal study of human-face recognition in wild birds, his preliminary findings confirm the suspicions of many other researchers who have observed similar abilities in crows, ravens, gulls and other species” If we don’t have a cohesive theory on the “outliers”, we have no theory.