Wisdom of Crows

Fables, Science, Storytelling

It is incredible to consider the role crows have played in creating links between fables and science. In laboratory experiments pioneered by scientists Nathan Emery and Christopher Bird, crows happily re-enacted Aesop’s fable ‘The Crow and the Pitcher’, putting stones in a pitcher to raise the water level to get a treat. Jo Wimpenny, author of Aesop’s Animals: The Science Behind the Fables (2021), which explores the representation of animals in traditional fables from a scientific perspective, is a crow expert. Her writing has been shaped by both the crow fable-inspired scientific debates and the crows she encountered during her research.

It was therefore a true pleasure to organise this crow fable session in collaboration with Jo, and the session we put together was a dream session, as we were joined by two other outstanding crow experts, Thom van Dooren, the environmental philosopher and author of The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (2019) and Kaeli Swift, an avian behavioural ecologist and the host of corvidresearch.blog, who is famous for her study on crow’s behaviours around death. The session was beautifully chaired by Matthew Churlew.

In her talk, Jo gives us further insights into how Aesop’s fable became integrated into scientific research, the kinds of studies it inspired, and how those studies have contributed to the thriving field of corvid cognition. Kaeli’s talk fascinatingly discusses the emergence of a new crow fable in the Anthropocene, in which crows are called upon to pick up garbage (talking of Kaeli as a fabulist, I highly recommend her story ‘Rectangle’ (2019), available on Audible – a powerful fable about a crow-human encounter, told from the crow’s perspective). Thom not only tells compelling ‘fables’ around the crows’ caching behaviours – such as Mariana crows on the brink of extinction, storing food for the future – but thought-provokingly suggests how fables themselves must change if they are to be able to tell animal stories of our time. Please find the recording of this session below.

Wisdom of Crows: Fables, Science, Storytelling

Chair: Matthew Churlew

What can a crow fable teach us about the intelligence, cognitive abilities, and emotional lives of corvids? What roles can scientists, ethologists, and multispecies ethnographers play in creating new crow fables befitting our evolving relationship with these amazing birds? This session brings together three leading crow experts to share their research in relation to fables, and to discuss how we might learn to listen to crows as co-fabulists, and the important lessons they have to impart.

Jo Wimpenny, The Crow and the Pitcher: how Aesop’s fable flew from fiction to fact
Kaeli Swift, Crows: From undertaker to garbage man and the real-time fable of the Anthropocene
Thom van Dooren, Exploring the border between ethics and ethology with crows

 

 

Jo Wimpenny is a zoologist and science writer based in Oxford, UK, with a research background in crow cognition and the history of science. Her DPhil investigated cognition in tool-using New Caledonian crows, and she then conducted postdoctoral research on the history of ornithology, co-authoring the award-winning Ten Thousand Birds: Ornithology Since Darwin (Princeton U. Press, 2014) with Tim Birkhead and Bob Montgomerie. Her book, Aesop’s Animals: The Facts Behind the Fables (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2021), critically appraised the characterisation of some of Aesop’s best-known animal characters, asking how they match up against the latest scientific research. For her current project (to be published by Bloomsbury Wildlife), she is delving deeper into the origins and nature of human-animal relationships, focusing on beasts in our cultures that are typically villainised or misunderstood.

Kaeli Swift earned her PhD in avian behavioral ecology from the University of Washington. While there, she studied American crows, with a special emphasis on behaviors around death.  She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, where she is studying the breeding ecology of the Tinian monarch.  You can read her popular science articles on her blog, corvidresearch.blog.  You can also find her on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok at the @corvidresearch handle.  Video, audio, and print reports of her research have been featured by: National Geographic, PBS, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ologies podcast, Science Friday and many others.

Thom van Dooren, FAHA, is Professor of Environmental Humanities and Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. His research and writing focus on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia UP 2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP 2019), and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT 2022). www.thomvandooren.org