Teaching crows to fly

Soon, she'll be learning how to fly other birds.

Even when the feathers grew back, Nugget wasn’t able to take off properly—she would often try to fly, crash-land, and break her feathers again. One of the other study crows, named Dara, also had some trouble flying, while the rest of the crows were fully flighted. When Davie designed their enclosure, she did so with these varying levels of mobility in mind. “We wanted to make sure that the exhibit was long enough and tall enough to sustain prolonged flight and let the flighted birds get to high perches,” she says. “Then we built ramps up to different levels in the exhibit, and branches that were designed in a sort of stepwise manner.”

What began as a simple routine grew more complex as she brought in different pieces of equipment: “She first started off rapidly moving her wings up and down, and then would do a little hop,” says Davie. After a few weeks of that, she added a run-and-jump, and then a hop from a high branch to a lower one and then back again. Eventually, she added a final move: she would climb up the wire mesh wall of the cage, and glide from there to the ground.

Nugget knew how to pace herself. Reviewing the hour-long tapes they made of the crows’ behaviour every morning, the researchers saw her repeat this workout for 15 minutes or half an hour, and then spend the rest of the time doing regular crow things: “hiding food, eating food, wandering around,” and hanging out with the other birds, says Davie.

The training paid off. In early December, a couple of weeks after the researchers had spotted her climbing the cage wire—and six months after she first started performing the routine—the researchers watched, surprised, as Nugget took off from the ground and flew straight up to a high perch. “We were just like, ‘Oh my god, you did it!,’” Davie recalls. “After that, we didn’t see her practice behaviour again."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/crow-taught-herself-to-fly