Crow and His Marbles
A surprise encounter leads to a meditation on animal intelligence
Years ago, I was walking down a quiet city street around this time of year, maybe a little earlier. The sky was blue, and it was warm enough that I didn’t need a coat that afternoon. I remember feeling especially grateful for that, knowing that these warm days were not going to last much longer.
Across the road, a few hundred feet in front of me, a big crow caught my eye. He was perched on a lamppost, and all his black-feathered body language told me he was focusing intently, and with some crafty delight, on the road beneath him. ‘Wily crow,’ I thought, ‘Up to his old tricks.’ (Though I’d no idea what they were). Trying to see for myself, I followed his gaze with mine, down to the road. Beneath him, there on the asphalt, I saw what looked like a large, green golf ball. ‘A giant marble? A tennis ball, maybe?’ I got closer and, for some reason, I paid more attention to the tree near the lamppost: it was a Black Walnut tree, and the green golf ball on the ground was in fact a ripe nut, covered in its bright husk.
As you may know, Black Walnuts are different than the walnuts you can buy in the grocery store (which are typically English Walnuts, a European transplant). Black Walnuts are a native species in Ontario. Their nuts are also edible; but, compared to their English cousins, they have more complex flavour, almost as if they’d been soaked in a fragrant rose water. There’s nothing like them. And if you’ve ever tried to open a Black Walnut, you’ll know there’s nothing like that either: the shells are outrageously tough, and it literally takes a hammer to split them – then something like a dental pick to scrape out the nut meat afterwards. The work is rewarding, but it’s work for sure.
Back to the crow now: A car drove by on his side of the road and its tire brushed against the walnut, which then went rolling slowly towards the sidewalk curb. With the car passed, the crow jumped off the lamppost and flew down to the nut, now stopped against the curb. I don’t remember exactly how, but one way or another, he moved it back to where it had just come from, pushed it with his beak until he liked where it was, and then, satisfied, quickly alighted back to his lamppost perch to resume his gleeful watch.
I stopped. I’d read about this before, but I couldn’t believe that I was actually witnessing it. Standing back, I waited for what I hoped would happen next.
It didn’t take long. Soon, another car drove by, this time running right over the walnut. Crunch. The crow, not at all sharing my surprise, dropped down again from his perch and started poking apart the mash, picking out and eating the nut meat. Then, a minute or so later, he moved another nut from the sidewalk gutter into the road and flew back up to his lamppost to wait.