Can crows read signs?
Wild crows were stealing insulation—to use in their nests—from a construction site on the campus of the International Coastal Research Center (ICRC) in Otsuchi, Japan.
The staff at the research center asked Tsutomu Takeda, a crow expert at Utsunomiya University, for advice. Takeda suggested they hang paper signs that read “crows do not enter.” (No, he wasn’t joking.) The crows immediately stopped stealing the insulation and have refrained for two years now.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the crows can read Japanese, but it raises some intriguing questions. Studies have shown that crows pay attention to human behavior and adjust their own in response. So it’s possible that the signs—which cause people to look up and then look around for crows—makes the crows nervous and they decided it’s no longer safe to steal the insulation. So while the clever corvids are not reading the words (at least we don’t think they are!), they may nonetheless be reading the behavioral signs of the humans on campus.
Read the full story on The Asahi Shimbun’s website.