Japanese Crows Were Seen Placing Walnuts in the Middle of the Road — Then Biologists Found Out Why

Zipping through the skies like a mob of black-jacketed dons, these crows wander in the air, often perched on electricity wires and patrolling the city for food. Crows in Japan are downright scary and aggressive. They have bloodied children’s faces to snatch candy and stolen baby animals from a Tokyo zoo, according to a report by the Seattle Times. Japan even has a sign that warns people, “Beware of the crows.” But these highly brackish and aggressive creatures are not all evil. In a stark contrast to their angry tendencies, their brains have a superpower that most of the other birds don’t have: intelligence, as PBS says.

Belonging to the corvid family, crows are infamous for their intelligence. Irrespective of whether they use their intelligence for good or evil, the intelligence that is there cannot be denied. Take this clip by RationalStabs where a crow solves an 8-step puzzle on live camera. One company even trained the crows to sweep away cigarette butts littering the streets in exchange for bird food. Lately, an archive clip by BBC Studios has been resurfacing on the internet that shows crows in Japan employing the most bizarre tactic to crack their nuts. All it takes for them to do this is a deep understanding of traffic lights through observations and a clever trick to utilize them for their benefit.

Crows in Japan station themselves on treetops and electricity wires dangling beside pedestrian walkways, sidewalks, and crosswalks connected to a traffic-bearing road. At the signal of the green light, the cunning crows drop the nuts they had foraged on the road. While the cars and other vehicles pass by, their rolling wheels pummel these nuts, cracking them open. The drivers running these vehicles have no idea that they are unknowingly offering the nut-cracking services to these blackbirds for free.

When the traffic signal shifts to red, these brash birds rush and plunge into the air, spreading their feathers and landing on the road. Before the signal changes again, they pick up the food and repeat the process until their bellies are satisfied. To a layman, this is weird. But to a biologist, this isn’t something unusual. According to biologists, the corvid family, including crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, and jackdaws, is regarded as one of the smartest creatures in the bird kingdom.

The crows in Japan have been observed cracking nuts using traffic lights only since 1990. But the intelligence of crows has sparked the interest of scientists ever since they were first studied. But this doesn’t work all the time, per PBS. For instance, the crows in California also tried to mimic this traffic light trick for cracking the nuts. But as it turned out, the nuts they shook and dropped down were walnuts, and walnuts are not easy to crack. Their soft green outer shell cannot be cracked using the same strategy of rolling vehicle tires as other nuts. In the end, this behavior of crows remains a mystery for the men of science to explore and investigate.

“There are many intriguing questions that remain to be answered about crows’ tool behavior. Most important would be whether or not they mostly learn or genetically inherit the know-how to make and use tools. Without knowing that it is difficult to say anything about their intelligence, although one could guess that these crows have the capability to be as clever as crows in general,” Doctor Gavin Hunt, a New Zealand biologist, said.

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