S1E1: Clever Crows

 The Animal Highlight is a spinoff and sister podcast to the award winning show, the Animal Turn Podcast. Season 1 is focused on “Animals and The Urban.”  In episode one, Claudia Hirtenfelder gives a brief highlight of crows offering some snippets into what makes them amazing.

Featured: 

• TED Talks - The Amazing Intelligence of Crows.
• Wild crows inhabiting the city use it to their advantage - David Attenborough - BBC wildlife
• The Animal Turn "Animal Highlights (Animals and The Urban)" Playlist on Youtube. 

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, producer and host.
• Christiaan Mentz, sound editor and producer.
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork).
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer.
• Learn more about the team here. 

Support the podcast via:

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/TheAnimalTurn 
• Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/theanimalturn 
• Buzzsprout: https://theanimalturn.buzzsprout.com/ 

Sponsor:

• Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics sponsored the season of The Animal Turn Podcast where these highlights were originally aired. Originally Aired/Recorded: 1 March 2021.

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Transcript

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00:00 - Introduction 

• This first season animals and the urban and is extracted from Season 3 of The Animal Turn Podcast.  
• Welcome to the animal highlight everyone. This is the first one and it is a new segment of the Animal Turn Podcast

00:57 – BBC Documentary 

• “I want to share with you a clip that actually blew my mind. I think it was one of the first clips I saw that opened the veil to me about thinking about animals in a more complicated way. Thinking about how they plan and sitting with my amazement a little bit.”
• “First I watched a clip, a Ted Talk by Joshua Klein about the amazing intelligence of crows.” He shared a clip from a BBC Documentary with David Attenborough. 

01:28 – Crow Cracking Nuts in a Japanese City 

• “Showed crows in a Japanese city who were dropping these nuts but they weren’t cracking them when they dropped them…So they switched strategies and stated to sit on traffic light poles and drop their nits into thee street so that cars would drive over the nuts, crack them open, and viola! Now the birds can eat the nuts.”
• “That’s amazing. It’s thinking about a plan, executing that plan. But then it gets perfected even more. These birds realize that if they just fly down from right there thy run the risk of being run over by a car.”
• “So what they start to do is to drop the nuts, not on any street. Not just in any place. But near pedestrian crossings, near traffic lights where cars will, from time to time, be made to stop. So the birds drop the nuts in the street. The nuts crack. And they wait patiently on the side of the road until the cars stop. They hop into the road and eat their nuts.”
• “This, for me, just blew my mind!”
• “At the time I was flabbergasted and I remain flabbergasted.”

02:53 – Research on Crows

• “And I think so much interesting work is coming out right now about crows and magpies”
• “They are solving all sorts of complicated problems. Everything from having a nut at the bottom of a jar, in water, and realizing that if they put stones in that water, the water level rises. So they can get their nut. And it seems simple, but it’s not. It’ really, really complicated.”

04:00 – Credits 

• A huge thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring The Animal Turn Podcast, where these clips were taken from. To Christiaan Mentz for editing this episode. Thank you also goes to Rebecca Shen for designing the Animal Highlight logo and episode art work.”