Good morning everyone,

Having covered some of the top Fem Fri preoccupations in the last three weeks – books, music and art – this week we turn to the fourth big one, which is critters.

Most readers will know me as a fan of corvids of all stripes, so naturally I was delighted to read Sabrina Schalz' work on urban crows, which shows that they pay more attention to unfamiliar languages. Not for treats. It seems like they are genuinely interested. There's a Twitter thread here, which is a good summary:

Large-Billed Crows in Tokyo pay more attention to an unfamiliar language than to the local Japanese, without prior training or rewards.

https://twitter.com/sabrinaschalz/status/1354371197425905666

And you can read the whole paper here:

When presented with sentences spoken by multiple speakers, the crows showed significantly more responses to the Dutch than to the Japanese, which suggests that they discriminate two languages with distinctive linguistic features, and that they might also be more attentive to an unfamiliar language, Dutch, compared to a familiar one, Japanese. These results further extend the hypothesis that language discrimination is based on a general perceptual mechanism that predates the evolution of language.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339143503_LANGUAGE_DISCRIMINATION_BY_LARGE-BILLED_CROWS

Crows are ideally suited to urban environments, where they constantly get to hear new words and solve new puzzles, and apparently it's the same thing for mice. Next time you see a mouse in your flat (I hope you don't) you can think about how much more clever that mouse is than the equivalent mouse in the countryside. We know this because of the work of Valeria Mazza and Anja Guenther:

Valeria Mazza of the University of Potsdam and Anja Guenther of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, in Plön, captured 17 striped field mice from farmland and 14 others from various places in central Berlin. They kept these animals in a laboratory for a year, to acclimatise them, and then challenged them with various tasks which, if performed successfully, would yield a reward of food. Tasks included opening the window panes of a house made of Lego bricks; opening the lid of a Petri dish; and yanking out a wad of paper jammed inside a clear plastic tube.[…] Both groups seemed equally eager to participate in the tasks, but the urban mice were better at solving the novel ones. They had a 77% success rate, to the rural mice’s 52%. When it came to the control task, though, both were equally good, solving it 85% and 88% of the time respectively.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/01/23/where-a-rodent-lives-may-determine-how-clever-it-is

I'm kind of interested in the "various places in central Berlin" you can catch a mouse. It probably really changes your relationship with department stores and restaurants to be doing that. Or maybe they just asked their mates to put down humane traps. Either way. Various places.

Have a nice weekend,

A xx.