Corvids Are Smart and Have a Better PR Agency

Crow with tool (Cornell University).

Corvids (crows, magpies, ravens, jays) are smart birds. So are parrots. But what I notice is that the Corvidae are better at getting their message out. Now why is that?

Take this article from Science Daily, "How Birds Evolved Big Brains." It seems even-handed:

The two groups of birds with truly exceptional brain sizes evolved relatively recently: parrots and corvids (crows, ravens, and kin). These birds show tremendous cognitive capacity, including the ability to use tools and language, and to remember human faces. The new study finds that parrots and crows exhibited very high rates of brain evolution that may have helped them achieve such high proportional brain sizes.

But then the photo (not the one here) is of a crow, and the closing quote is this bit of corvid triumphantalism:

"Crows are the hominins of the bird kingdom," says co-author Dr. Jeroen Smaers of Stony Brook University. "Like our own ancestors, they evolved proportionally massive brains by increasing both their body size and brain size at the same time, with the brain size increase happening even more rapidly."

Corvids are better than parrots at manipulating the news media, after all, but maybe it's not that hard.