Clever Crows Are Now Picking Up Cigarette Butts — And Quietly Saving Millions in Cleaning Costs

If there existed a song by the name of “Wicked Reputation,” it would probably be dedicated to crows. They arrive in rowdy mobs, spitting blacklight shadows, often swooping and dive-bombing from the trees to hoard up on morsels of food. When provoked, these ruffian black birds flare up into aggression and become the zombie crows of Resident Evil, attacking humans with their pointy beaks. Deny them what they want, and they’ll hold grudges against you for years. Despite their sly and truculent motives, crows are immensely mystical.

These bully boys are supernatural possessors of willowy intelligence, the reason why Edgar Allen Poe made a psychopomp raven his companion when he found himself drifting through an endless dark night of grief. Crows, The Conversation explains, are known to match the problem-solving ability of a 7-year-old human. A Swedish startup used its brainpower to conduct a remarkable anti-litter operation, reported The Guardian. Corvid Cleaning, a company based in the city of Södertälje, located near Stockholm, recruited a gang of Swedish crows to tidy up the streets by picking up scattered cigarette butts.

The hired birds were mostly Caledonian crows, which are known as one of the most intelligent among the corvid family of crows. They trained these birds to function according to a reward-based system. The crows were supposed to collect cigarette butts littering the streets and deposit them in trash cans attached to a special machine. In return, peanuts would be dispensed as the reward, which they could nibble right away or take home for their fledglings.

The operation was initiated with the intention of cutting the costs involved in cleaning the city. The outlet reported that Södertälje spends a whopping 20 million Swedish kronor (20.8 million US dollars) on street cleaning each year. Such an astronomical money notwithstanding, Sweden’s streets were observed to be bestrewn with half-smoked cigarette butts some reckless locals tumbled and tossed, creating sloppy mess. The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation revealed that there were more than 1 billion cigarette butts that cluttered Swedish streets each year. This means, cigarette butts made up approximately 62% of the entire garbage that bespattered the road strips.

Christian Günther-Hanssen, the founder of Corvid Cleaning, believed that this unusual strategy could cut at least 75% of the costs employed for the street cleaning, particularly those involved in picking up the cigarette butts from the streets. “They are wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis,” Hanssen told The Guardian at the time of rolling out the operation. Estimating the mathematics of the entire operation, Hanssen explained, “The estimation for the cost of picking up cigarette butts today is around 80 öre [Swedish change] or more per cigarette butt, some say two kronor [around $0.20]. If the crows pick up cigarette butts, this would maybe be 20 öre per cigarette butt.”

The main reason why the team hired crows for this job is because they are “easier to teach,” Hanssen shared. Moving on, the team believes in the potential of these garish birds, that they could do more than just clean up cigarette butts. Besides, it’s easier to train them to clean the cigarettes than to train humans not to throw them on the ground. If this could work in other aspects, crows could potentially prove themselves to be more intelligent creatures than the human species.