Journey Into The Animal Mind

Author(s): Ross Andersen
Publisher: Ross Andersen

Page 10

As Singh and I talked, the crow grew bored with us and turned back to the window, as though to inspect its faint reflection. In 2008, a magpie-a member of crows' extended family of corvids, or "feathered apes”-became the first non-mammal to pass the “mirror test.” The magpie's neck was marked with a bright dot in a place that could be seen only in a mirror. When the magpie caught sight of its reflection, it immediately tried to check its neck.
[Read: What mirrors tell us about animal minds ]
Singh told me this crow would soon move upstairs, to one of the roof's exposed cages, where the birds have more space to test their still-fragile wings, in view of an open sky that must surely loom large in a bird's consciousness. With luck, it would quickly return to the spirited life preferred by wild crows, which sometimes play like acrobats in high winds and ski down snowy surfaces. (Birds that die at this hospital are buried along a riverbed outside Delhi, an apt touch in the case of the crows, which sometimes hold funerals-or, if not funerals, postmortems, where they gather around their dead like homicide detectives discerning cause of death.)
I asked Singh how he felt when he released birds on the rooftop. “We are here to serve them," he said, and then noted that not all the birds leave right away. "Some of them come back and sit on our shoulders.”