I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

These crows, they hide food, but they also steal other birds' food.

So it matters to them because anyone else

who's watching might be about to steal their caches and because the birds play both the

role simultaneously of being the cacher and protector of their own food and the thief, the pilferer of somebody else's food.

They have this sort of double act going on of strategising where to hide their own food

to maximise the chance that nobody else steals it,

but also watching where others are cashing their food to maximise the chance that they steal their food.

That's Nikki Clayton. And the remarkable skills of crows and other corvids like Jays and

rooks and magpies that she's uncovered in her lab at Cambridge University have upended

conventional wisdom about the intelligence of birds.

You know, I've read how smart some birds can be,

but until they came across your work, I had no idea.

And crows seem to stand out, is that right?

Yeah, they're the feathered apes. They're part of a whole family called Corvids, is that right? Yeah, they're the feathered apes.

They're part of a whole family called Corvidge, is that right?

Yeah.

So the Corvids are members of the Crow family that include the Ravens, the Jays, the Magpies.

Does anybody know why they're so different?

Why they're so clever?

I think they've dealt with a lot of the same selection pressures that the great apes have had to deal with. So they're highly social, they're very long-loat,

they use tools, and they keep track of time, just like the chimpanzees. I've heard you say that

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