A raven out of synch with my bedside clock guarantees I get an early start to the day.
Although the clocks went back in April I didn’t get the benefit of an extra hour in bed because the female forest raven I feed daily kept to her old routine.
If you are a raven you judge time by the rising and falling of the sun and not the ticking of a clock.
“My” raven sits on the roof at exactly seven o’clock instead of the current time an hour later, at the moment I usually rose to feed her during summer time, and caws loudly to attract my attention. I should turn over and go back to sleep but I feel guilty about ignoring her.
I know she must be hungry, in need of a snack of cheese – my usual offering – to fuel the vast amount of energy she needs for flight throughout the day.
I don’t mind being an early bird, though, because it gives me a chance to correspond by email with a close friend who lives in Britain, mainly about the exploits of his favourite football team, Manchester City.
As a reward for the support I’ve given his team during the English season – my own team, Fulham, was relegated – he sent me a BBC podcast of an on-air discussion about animal and bird intelligence.
Much of the discussion concerned members of the crow family, or corvids, birds considered to have an intelligence on a par with the great apes.
An animal psychologist who studies crow cognition, Nicola Clayton, said crows had huge brains relative to their body size and this greater capacity made possible cognitive abilities like thinking, memory and planning ahead.
Crows were also capable of social inter-actions beyond their own species.
Dr Clayton said during studies of corvids her subjects had offered her gifts, including shiny bottle tops and the rings from the tops of beer and soft-drink cans. And she told of a nine-year-old Californian schoolgirl who fed crows each day and was in turn presented with gifts of shiny objects.
One day, after the schoolgirl’s mother lost a ring, one of the crows turned up with the treasured piece of jewellery in its beak.
Crows mate for life and often have complex feeding rituals to cement bonds, something that Dr Clayton has set out to study.
In one experiment involving Eurasian jays – an elegant, colourfully-plumaged member of the crow family – it was established that a male could determine what was his female’s preferred food. He would feed this to her, even though he might not choose it for himself from a range of foods offered.
Many birds and animals – squirrels among them – stash food but the crows took this further. Crows had been found to move a store of nuts when they perceived other crows had been watching them. But the only crows to do this where crows that had stolen food from other crows.
In the crow world it appeared the adage “it takes a thief to know a thief’ was true, said Dr Clayton.