a few years ago when i moved to socal i made friends with a few crows that lived in the area. I’d give them seeds sometimes and they’d leave shiny black feathers on the windowsill by my computer.
After a bit i started imitating one of their calls with a whistle. they’d stop and kinda look at me, then do the call back. After a few weeks of this one of them would come right up to the tree by the window and do it, and it seemed to have a lot of fun? So i started changing the call, adding one or taking one whistle out of my response.
the bird did a head tilt thing, but after a few minutes it responded by taking the call i gave it and returning it by adding another caw onto its response. The base response was five caws, what i was originally imitating, so i’d return six, it’d return seven, and count up together that way. Really nice thing to do when you’re stoned and hanging out.
Anyway they’d always top out around 11 caws then reset, so after a couple days i changed it and started counting down once we got to 10 or 11. The crow figured it out almost right away and we’d count back down together. For whatever reason it didn’t like going below 3 or above 11 so we’d just pass the call back and forth between those numbers, sometimes for like an hour.
There wasn’t a reward or treat or anything associated with this. They just seemed to find it fun. anyway yeah i’ve been pretty sure crows can at least increment and decrement and hold numbers in their heads for years cuz of this.
