In honor of the Japanese crow story in today's Links Dump, here's a filler post with a picture of a Japanese crow:
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tags: crows, intelligence, birds
After blogging about my experiences earlier this week, I had crows on the brain. So, as I went drifting through fractal sets, trying to come up with something for this week’s Friday Fractal (now a Saturday Set), I kept running across crow-like shapes.
New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) have remarkable tool-using abilities that are at least as sophisticated as those of chimpanzees, if not more so.
What your picture doesn't show is scale. When we lived in Yokohama, we used to call these "mutant crows" because they were so big.
I, for one, welcome our coming corvid overlords.
[/stale_joke]
Brian, I also found them startlingly large.
Also, I was watching _Princess Tutu_ at the time, so large black birds that said "caw" were . . . attention-getting.