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Crows are considered to be some of the most intelligent birds around and some will be trained to pick up litter in exchange for food, potentially saving the Nordic country millions in street-cleaning efforts.videoA start-up in Sweden has begun recruiting crows in a pilot project to assist in cleaning up the streets of the city of Södertälje in Greater Stockholm.Crows are among the most intelligent animals in Sweden and can learn to pick things up in exchange for food, something that the local company Corvid Cleaning aims to benefit from. In particular, the birds will be taught to pick up...

New research into the minds of crows has revealed a jaw-dropping finding: the canny corvids aren't just clever - they also possess a form of consciousness, able to be consciously aware of the world around them in the present. In other words, they have subjective experiences.

Neuron-Packed Bird Brains Point to Creation by Jeffrey P. Tomkins, Ph.D. * The amazing ability of birds to achieve ape-level cognitive traits—and in some cases exceed them like when they emulate human speech—has long confounded the evolutionary paradigm that claims humans evolved from apes. Now the bird intelligence evolutionary quandary has worsened as described in a new research report that shows bird brains contain over twice as many neurons per unit area as ape brains.

"In the past, people thought birds were stupid," laments the aptly named scientist Christopher Bird. But in fact, some of our feathered friends are far cleverer than we might think. And one group in particular - the corvids - has astonished scientists with extraordinary feats of memory, an ability to employ complex social reasoning and, perhaps most strikingly, a remarkable aptitude for crafting and using tools. Some corvids, such as rooks, live in large groups Mr Bird, who is based at the department of zoology at Cambridge University, says: "I would rate corvids as being as intelligent as primates in...