Release planned for native bird species extinct in wild

Updated 6:16 pm, Saturday, August 27, 2016

HILO, Hawaii (AP) — A dozen birds native to Hawaii will be released in November to end over a decade of extinction in the wild for the species.

The corvid is part of the crow family and will be reintroduced at a natural area reserve aviary, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reported (http://bit.ly/2bOs2LC).

State and federal wildlife officials along with the San Diego Zoo have planned more releases over a five-year period.

First-year costs will be $800,000 and decrease by about half after that. The zoo and federal and state dollars fund the program.

"It's been such a long-term and large-scale conservation effort," said project coordinator Jackie Gaudioso-Levita. "We are extremely excited to see and hear 'alala in the wild."

The 12 birds are going to an aviary to ease the transition from captivity.

Predators and disease killed 21 of 27 corvids that were raised in captivity and then released in the 1990s.

San Diego Zoo experts are giving chicks in this latest group lessons in hiding from predators.

The release was postponed to November from mid-September.

"It's to make sure that every aspect of the project is completely ready to go," Gaudioso-Levita said.

Public outreach for the project has been ongoing.

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Despite their small brains, ravens and crows may be just as clever as chimps, research suggests

Study shows how these birds parallel great apes in motor self-regulation

Date: April 26, 2016

Source: Lund University

A study led by researchers at Lund University in Sweden suggests that ravens can be as clever as chimpanzees, despite having much smaller brains, indicating that rather than the size of the brain, the neuronal density and the structure of the birds' brains play an important role in terms of their intelligence.

"Absolute brain size is not the whole story. We found that corvid birds performed as well as great apes, despite having much smaller brains," says Can Kabadayi, doctoral student in Cognitive Science.

Intelligence is difficult to test, but one aspect of being clever is inhibitory control, and the ability to override animal impulses and choose a more rational behaviour. Researchers at Duke University, USA, conducted a large-scale study in 2014, where they compared the inhibitory control of 36 different animal species, mainly primates and apes. The team used the established cylinder test, where food is placed in a transparent tube with openings on both sides. The challenge for the animal is to retrieve the food using the side openings, instead of trying to reach for it directly. To succeed, the animal has to show constraint and choose a more efficient strategy for obtaining the food.

The large-scale study concluded that great apes performed the best, and that absolute brain size appeared to be key when it comes to intelligence. However, they didn't conduct the cylinder test on corvid birds.

Can Kabadayi, together with researchers from the University of Oxford, UK and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, therefore had ravens, jackdaws and New Caledonian crows perform the same cylinder test to better understand their inhibitory control.

Continued ...

Crows Are No Bird-Brains: Neurobiologists Investigate Neuronal Basis of Crows' Intelligence

Nov. 28, 2013 — Scientists have long suspected that corvids -- the family of birds including ravens, crows and magpies -- are highly intelligent. Now, Tübingen neurobiologists Lena Veit und Professor Andreas Nieder have demonstrated how the brains of crows produce intelligent behavior when the birds have to make strategic decisions.

Their results are published in the latest edition of Nature Communications.

Read on ...

Binocular bird's eye view something for corvids to crow about (2:28)

Dec. 31 - New Caledonian crows are well-known for their ability to use tools but new research, recorded on video, reveals the impressive binocular overlap of the celebrated bird's vision which helps it seek out food. Researchers from the British universities of Oxford, Birmingham, and St Andrews got a bird's eye view of the crow at work by placing an ophthalmoscope video camera inside a baited tube and studying how the corvid uses its overlapping vision and straight bill to help it access larvae. Jim Drury has more.

Video at:  http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/12/31/reuters-tv-binocular-birds-eye-view-something-for-c?videoId=240210070&videoChannel=118065

A five-night bird scare in Rochester

Consider them live, professional scare crows.

In its long battle against the 15,000 to 20,000 crows that hang out in its downtown, the City of Rochester has hired anti-crow warriors from the USDA. Crews are working through the night, on the city's dime, to harass the birds out of town with lasers, pyrotechnics and recordings of crow distress calls, according to the Rochester Post-Bulletin.

City officials will analyze the effectiveness of the work after five nights. To see the newspaper's full story, go here.

http://www.startribune.com/local/blogs/182254881.html

Hushed Hoarders and Prying Pilferers: Eurasian Jays Change Strategies to Prevent Others from Stealing Food

ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2012) — In order to prevent other birds from stealing the food they are storing for later, Eurasian jays, a type of corvid, minimizes any auditory hints a potential pilferer may use to steal their cache (food that is buried for later use). The new research was published December 5, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Corvids are prolific cachers (or hoarders), burying food such as acorns in several thousand locations over the course of a year. When food becomes scarce during winter and spring, they remember where they buried their caches and retrieve the food items. However, pilfering of caches is commonplace. As a result, they are often trying to minimize other birds stealing their food and maximize the food that they steal.

In the first experiment, the researchers gave the jays options to hide food in substrates which varied in the amount of noise they made (a tray containing noisy gravel and a tray containing quiet sand). The birds' preferences for using these different substrates were tested when they were alone, when they had another bird that could see and hear them and when there was another bird that could hear but could not see them.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121205084423.htm

Clever jays switch food-finding tactics

Jays demonstrate "flexible tactics" by switching between storing food and stealing from others' stashes, scientists have found.

The woodland birds are known as the shy members of the notoriously intelligent corvid family.

But birds were observed boldly stealing food from subordinates' hiding places in the University of Cambridge study.

Researchers found that the jays' strategy was dependent on the relative social rank of their opponent.

The results are published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

Eurasian jays live in woodlands and feed primarily on acorns. Past studies by the University of Cambridge team have highlighted the birds' remarkable ability to plan for the future by storing thousands of the nuts and returning to them later.


Continued: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19660267



More information on the jay ( Garrulus glandarius ):

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/name/j/jay/

http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/birds/jay.htm