are very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning medea benjamin medea benjamin is a former economist and nutritionist with the united nations and the world health organization she has been an advocate for social justice for more than forty years and was called one of the highest profile leaders of the peace movement by the los angeles times she is co founder of code pink and global exchange her articles appear regularly and outlets such as the huffington post common dreams alter ed news she is the author and editor of eight books including no free lunch food and revolution in cuba today bridging the global gap a handbook to linking citizens of the first and third worlds stop the next war now effective responses to violence and terrorism and she is here to talk about her new book drone warfare killing by remote control medea thank you very much for coming to spend time with us this morning good morning mike it's good to be here so  start out tell us the motivation in writing drone warfare i looked at what was happening post nine eleven mike and i thought well you know our government is putting out this idea and this was under bush that we now had these fancy new weapons and that we could target our enemies so precisely that there would be no collateral damage and i thought that doesn't sound right and i had been i had started a human rights group called global exchange and have a healthy skepticism of all things government and decided to go to the region and see what was happening this was right after the invasion of afghanistan and lo and behold there were lots of innocent people who had been killed whose lives were destroyed and  i realized over these last ten years that this new technology particularly the drones was being sold to the american people as a way to make war humanely and that people were buying it and i wanted to give people the understanding that these new weapons are not surgically precise they are not more humane they're actually making more easier and pulling us into new conflicts that the american people don't even know about so when you say drones are you speaking primarily of aerial drones so drones are aerial vehicles that don't have a pilot in the in the cockpit in the case of the ones being used to target and kill people they are mostly being piloted from the united states from air bases here or from the cia headquarters here so the pilots are in air conditioned rooms  comfortable chairs and they're killing people thousands and thousands of miles away that they don't know anything about it's a surreal kind of warfare when you think about it and it's happening not only in places where we have a more open declared war like in the case of afghanistan but also in pakistan yemen somalia the philippines and the u s is opening new bases for drones in other parts of the world in the middle east as well as in africa so describe what the various types of drones are size and and what they're armed with well there's all kinds of drones mostly used for surveillance there's the size of insects birds  there are drones that can be put in a soldier's backpack and launched individually but i've been focusing on the drones that are the size of either small airplanes or larger airplanes the predator and reaper drones made by general atomics in southern california but drones do come in all shapes and sizes and they have in common that they are relaying information to whoever is piloting them on the ground most of them are for surveillance kind of activities but they can easily be weaponized that's what happened with the predator and reaper drone they were originally surveillance drones and then they started strapping weapons on to them so they can be easily converted and that's one of the reasons i tell people as i travel around with this new book that we better be worried not only about all the blowback from killing people overseas with our drones and spying on countries like iran that managed to hack into  down a u s drone but also about drones being used right here at home ok so you mentioned iran hacking into that i don't think that was ever clear immediately after when that drone came down well it wasn't clear because the s government was embarrassed that first they said wait wait that's not even our drone and then they said no no wait they didn't have a down somehow we brought it down and it turns out that indeed the iranians had hacked into it and brought down a very sophisticated drone that is that first they thanked president obama for and then they reversed engineered it and they've been producing their own and not only that they starting a factory in venezuela to produce and as well but that's just one example there are so many drones mike that are being sold on the open market by the u s but mostly by israel that has no restrictions on selling their drones overseas so they're selling them to about fifty different countries around the world and now the chinese have gotten into the act as well so anybody who thought ok you know the u s can get away with this because we're so powerful and we're the ones who have the drones should think twice and they're also slated to be used in this country  very soon i mean they're already cleared the way for well you're seattle police department is one of the testing sites for drones in the hands of the police and i think the people of seattle should be horrified that your police department is being militarized to the extent to have your own drones and this is part of an experiment that's being pushed by the drone manufacturers to say hey wouldn't it be lovely of all eighteen thousand police stations in the united states had their own drones so the federal aviation administration has been giving out some testing permits to about thirty police stations including the one here in seattle and if now there is new legislation that says by september tw the u s airspace has to be opened up to drones entirely which means that if we don't do something about it all of those police stations are going to have drones and as i said well they've been talented for things like search and rescue missions they can be weaponized and they can also have all kinds of techniques for spying and citizens and that includes facial recognition thermal imaging cracking into your wife and text messages and of course when you think about who is going to be surveilled here in the united states it's immigrant communities it's occupy folks it's protesters it's african american communities muslim  countries currently where do they fly out of where that one of the bases that they are based in they can be based just about anywhere which is what makes this technology pretty remarkable for example the drones being flown in afghanistan are being piloted from air force bases like creech air force base outside of las vegas drones being flown in pakistan are being piloted side the cia in virginia and there are drone bases that are being set up in the region as well they need a local base near where they're being used to launch them from and maintain them but they can be piloted basically anywhere in the world and some of these drones can fly for extended periods of times are correct yes that's the quote beauty of these drones they can be up in the air for long periods of time they hover over villages they terrify local  populations when they fly low they have a buzzing sound that there are no words for in local languages that is called the sound of death because people never know when they're going to launch one of these hellfire missiles and who's going to be killed during the night  strike every three days now it's down to one every four days but thousands have been people have been killed in pakistan alone there are not journalists allowed into the region so we have to collect this information from a variety of sources but it seems like one hundred seventy five children have been killed and according to the administration like and this is something that's pretty mind blowing the they do define any male of military age who is in the area where we are using these drones as militants there have to commit any crime they don't have to be charge of the proven guilty of anything just by virtue of the fact that they are men in these areas they are considered fair game and the cia and now the joint special operations commander j sac of the military have the authority in pakistan and yemen to kill people who are not only on a hit list who have been identified by name but also to kill people on the basis of suspicious activity so there are a lot of innocent people who are being killed by these quote surgically precise drone strikes wouldn't most living males fall within that range of being a potential militant well that's right and also when you're talking about places like yemen and northern pakistan if you identify people further as having beards and turbans and carrying guns you're talking about most of the men as well and so that's why your listeners when they hear like we heard just on saturday last week oh twelve militants killed ten militants killed whatever the number you got to think well who are these people and the other thing mike is that by  the authority of the the us claims to have is that they are killing people who are about to kill us most of these people have no possibility of killing americans they might have joined the local taliban out of poverty out of desperation out of wanting some stability in their region out of religious beliefs but not because they wanted to act attack americans now of course the the more we use these drones the more we get people angry at us the more people then do want to join a militant group and try to find a way to get back into afghanistan for example to kill kill american soldiers but when you think about how secure it is this whole thing is we are killing people who we think might want to someday kill us and once we kill them their families their tribe their neighbors do want to kill us so it really is a state of perpetual war that only benefits the producers of these weapons you talked about president obama and the kill list because you talk about that some more because my understanding is they have regular weekly meetings now to discuss this yeah it's pretty remarkable when you think about they have something that they call terror tuesdays where they meet on tuesdays they look through information that is resembles baseball cards and they come up with a kill list so they decide who is going to live and who is going to die they play the prosecutor judge jury executioner all at once and president obama is intimately involved in this in fact some of this information was leaked to the new york times and other press as part of a campaign strategy to show any independents or any people who still might think after all these years that president obama is a bit of a wuss when it comes to killing that this should convince them that he is indeed a tough guy  i think it is really shocked a lot of people because i see having completed the book at a time when there wasn't a lot of talk about drones there suddenly is a lot of talk about drones and a lot of people are coming out to my talks because they are horrified at the idea of the president playing this kind of role really the role of god and saying that he has the right the ability and he does it with ease deciding who is going to live and who is going to die and even has put americans on killis you know the drones don't give anybody a chance to surrender by international law you're supposed to be able to surrender and one would think that here in the u s that we had the right to a judicial process  that you couldn't just be executed by your own government without that process but lo and behold it seems that americans don't have that right and american people have been killed including a sixteen year old denver born boy killed by a and for most of the kill ist in in pakistan as well so yes and he doesn't sign off on the kill is this is this just behavior because that's a much more broad category but he is the one who really comes up in the end with this kilis and we have not declared war on any of those three countries is that correct well that's a good comment to make because indeed we haven't and one of the things that terrifies me about the drones is that the obama administration has now claimed to the right as the executive branch to decide when to use violence when to have the u s engages in conflicts without the congress even having a chance to discuss it so congress has not talked about making war and in pakistan or yemen and somalia congress didn't even have a say when the u s got involved militarily in libya because the administration says well when you're only using drones no american lives are at risk why this doesn't enter into the war powers act that congress has so it's a amazing usurpation of power on the  behalf of the executive branch and whether or not somebody likes the obama administration might be able to forgive them for all of these drone strikes think about the next president the next president and how they are going to use this newfound power that the obama administration has taken are there any members of congress that are objecting to this policy there are members of congress on the left and the right like dennis  problem is they haven't been able to move the vast majority of congress people on this when dennis kucinich introduced a letter to president obama that didn't say what i would have liked to say which is stop kill ground the drones this is you know disgusting behavior and we won't have it anymore it simply said could you be a little transparent and accountable dealt with the way the you were using these he only got twenty five other congress people to sign on to him that's about a third of the progressive caucus so it seems like in an election year it's very difficult to get democrats to criticize president obama and folks on the right well they love this killing you know they they probably go for it even more whole hog than the obama administration is do you have a sense for how many congressional districts have production facilities for drones m m well that's another very good question and since most of this information is secret if we don't we know that every major weapons manufacturer including boeing and raytheon northrop grumman lockheed martin general atomics general dynamics they all are involved in drone production leon panetta the secretary of defense and said it's the only game in town this is the future of warfare so they all want to piece of the pie whether they're making the entire drone or pieces for the drone or new kinds of missiles to attach to the drone or the cameras they're all involved in this and not only these companies but a lot of universities and especially state universities we're starting to get some of this information through freedom of information act requests but it's pretty much guarantee that in every state there is a lot of involvement through think tanks universities scientific centers research centers and manufacturers in your own production and in fact i know that in the recent documents that the electronic frontier foundation was key in getting out that universities were key in getting licenses to fly drones well that's right and this is something that we should be very concerned about in the fall we're going to do a campaign on campuses to have the students first demand that this information be made public who is working with the military on this and what is the nature of the project and if indeed the students then determine that this is something they think is immoral to try to sever t and there's also the issue of student money being invested in companies that are producing these weapons so we're anxious to be working with students like we already are with johns hopkins that has a lot of ties with the military and this and other kinds of weapons production you were talking about that these drones that are being used in places like afghanistan and pakistan are being flown or controlled here in the u s how many people are involved with keeping a drone up in the air well another good question it is counterintuitive mike you would think that because there's no pilot in the cockpit you're actually saving on labor but there's an immense number of people who are involved in keeping these drones up in the air it's estimated that for one of these killer drones to keep it up for a day takes about one hundred sixty people and a lot of that is the people who are required to look at all the images that are coming out on the screens to poor through this data there are big big drones like the global hawk that are these huge surveillance drones the size of a commercial airliner and they produce thousands of hours of images that have to be gone through and so between the maintenance it's estimated that the drones on the border for example they were quire one hour of maintenance for every hour in the air and because these drones are in the air for long periods of time they are a lot more expensive to run then has been told to the american public because that's one of the quote advantages that we've been told that these are cheap that you can buy drones for ten million twenty million dollars and you could buy drones for the police force for a couple hundred thousand dollars but when you look at the maintenance costs and also the fact that a lot of these crash many of them crash the technology is really not there yet and that's why the f a a has been reluctant to permit a lot of because they know how often they crash but you put all these factors together they are very labor intensive and they're actually quite expensive red the least one of those drones that they have so many cameras on them now it's like in the hundreds for some of them are well yes and you look at the large global hawk it's got tremendous numbers of cameras and incredible technology that is used for the sensors in the imaging  yes there's all kinds of drones with all different levels of sophistication but the as i said earlier they are proliferating in great numbers and it is not  for standard aircraft yes that's an old fashioned thing now to be a pilot in the aircraft the new pilots are almost all being trained now to be drone pilots something that was very difficult for the old fashion pilots to agree to there was a lot of resistance particularly in the air force to the drones but now that enough time has passed they realize as panetta said this is the only game in town and there's not much to do about it but we do want to reach out to pilots that are piloting commercial aircraft in the united states and pilots for companies like messenger services because those companies would like to have their fleets all be transformed into pilotless or drone kinds of aircraft and this would be devastating to the pilots association  so we were talking about congress previously i don't understand there's also like a drone caucus or something like that indeed there is who would have thought that fifty eight members of congress including democrats and republicans would think that one of the primary purposes for their being elected by we the people was to promote the drone industry to address what they called the urgent need for the use of more u for not only overseas but for domestic use as well so these legislators have passed new legislation opening up our airspace they are pushing for any restrictions on drone sales overseas to be removed and they are doing the bidding of this now very powerful drone industry and do you anticipate that drones will be making it in to private ownership i mean it is code pink going to eventually be buying a drone well we actually do have a drone you know there are these very small drones that you can buy you can even buy them from your good old amazon dot com for about three hundred three hundred fifty bucks you too can have your own drone and must say they are very flimsy they break all the time so then you've got to go out and buy the spare parts for them and there are many people in the occupy movement who thought oh cool you know let's have our own drones we can fly lover the heads of the police and see what they're doing and have it on camera when they use excessive force that's all well and good but what is really driving this industry is the military homeland security the law enforcement agencies and as  permits are handed out we can guess who is going to get the permits yes there are going to be commercial drones and some of them might have very good uses in fact there are good uses for drones now there are fire departments that have drones and say that they can use them to pinpoint where the fire is coming from when you have large forested areas or environmental groups that say that they are using drones on the high seas to detect where illegal whalers are so there are some positive uses for drones but we have to really think about where is the impetus of the drone movement coming from and where will  drones be they are not only going to be law enforcement agencies and the military but they will be corporations and corporations using having their own fleet of drones is a very frightening thing to to many people and already we see oil companies like chevron having drones to protect their resources from the local people wow like the way they protected their resources in one juror yeah that's right and that's exactly where they have drones in nigeria let's talk about things we can as citizens can do you tart previously about your efforts this coming fall on campuses what else do you see is potential ways to address this like we have a lot of campaigns and as i travel around learning more things that people think we should do so for example at the local level we're asking people to meet with their police department or make a simple phone call and in the seattle area this is absolutely  critical to do ask what are these drones that you have have they been use what are they being used for why do you think they need them in a time of austerity what is this costing us the taxpayers and where do you get the money for it and then i think it adds something like we don't think you need those drones that we're also asking communities to pass no drone resolutions to say they don't want these drones to be used to invade their privacy where working with congress p people from the progressives to rand paul to say that drones cannot be used to invade our our privacy without a warrant and that government agencies shouldn't give out grants to local police departments to buy  drones then on some of the other international levels where meeting with and pressuring the intelligence oversight committees and u s congress to try to get the drones out of the hands of the cia we are taking a delegation to pakistan in the fall in september twenty first to twenty eight to do a peace march with the people of pakistan in the areas of northern pakistan was there a stand where the drones are killing so many innocent people were very excited about it where we're meeting in islam but on an international peace day september twenty first and inviting people of the public to join us all this information is on two websites one is called drones watch dot org that's plural drones watch dot org and the other is code pink org and you can find out about the trip to pakistan you can sign up to tell the  congress to do its job and get drones out of the hands of the cia you can put your own personal message to the u s ambassador in pakistan who now signs off on death warrants these drone strikes and say hey you're supposed to be a diplomat use negotiations and peace talks and not these death machines and we will handle liver it to the ambassador when the we are there so these are some of the campaigns and another one is to reach out to the faith based community we are reaching out to reverend priests the moms rabbis and say this is a critical moral issue of our times you should be speaking out about it here is a statement that we would like you to sign on to and that statement you can find on those websites as well so that some of the outreach and some of the campaigns were involved in we are speaking with medea benjamin she is co founder of code pink and global exchange and author of the new book drone warfare killing by remote control and you are speaking tonight here in seattle at seven pm at elliott bay books and so i'm sure people are going to have a lot more questions for you and that would be good form to  do that well that would in a way be also a wonderful forum to buy this book which i think is a pretty critical tool for people to have because mike i don't know if you've seen any of these statistics but it seems like the overwhelming majority of americans think these drones are a good thing and that's our colleagues our relatives our you know people that we interact with on a regular basis we've got to convince them that these drones are not a good thing and this book will give people the tools they need for winning those arguments and also the last two chapters are all about what are people doing both on the local the national and the international level like at the u and hopefully will inspire people to support some of these actions so i hope people come tonight get a copy of the book and also discuss some of these issues and give us some new ideas for campaigns  well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thanks for having are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning tony angel tony angel is an author illustrator and sculptor he has authored and or illustrated a dozen award winning books related to natural history some of which include ravens crows magpies and jays marine birds and mammals of puget sound birds of prey of the pacific northwest slope in the company of crows and ravens puget sound through an artist's eye and he is here to talk about his new book which he coauthored with john marshall if entitled gifts of the crow how perception emotion and thought allow smart birds to behave like humans tony thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning mike gets my pleasure here start out tell us what was the motivation in writing your new book gifts of the crow well the motivation i think came after we finished our last book in the company of crows and ravens because of the response that we got from really all of the we're all over the world where crows and ravens and magpies and not crackers and their kin are found people reputable people who observe carefully if you will and don't make stories up started to contact us and tell us about all a miraculous strange or unusual things these birds were doing so we put our heads together and said you know what let's let's sit down and figure some of this out let's interview these people make a follow up contact if they're out of the country and try to put a screen on this and get some accuracy to it and what do we come up with and we came up with a body of experiences a body of  experiments along with observations that really compiled for us a book that also told us about how comparable the brains of cor are to the human brain and it took us in a direction for this new book that we weren't really aware that we would go until we got into it and that was to look at the current neuro biological research on this  particular group of birds and look at the crows brain and give credibility if you will to some of the unusual things that they do by showing that in the brain of this bird they're capable of it even though their brain is so much different than the mammalian brain they still have all the equipment to do incredible things and that's the framework for the book all right so you divided the book into seven sections is that correct pretty much seven sections  some introductory things but yes and language was the first area you focused on so talk a bit about that well we also get a lot of questions continuously and people ask  are crows and ravens sane and i think that's one of the most difficult handles to to get hold of when it comes to understanding those communications but we know that they are indeed communicating with one particular and his science team get out on a number of projects but some of them are to measure the nuances in the calling to determine if in fact there are differences from call call that would give information that we otherwise might miss because our hearing wouldn't pick it up and there's a hint of this but it's still an area that really needs a lot more explore exploration on the other hand one of the things that we discovered was that they can use human terms in context and get rewards for it so like we would employ a word of or a phrase give it to me and get a return on it these birds have picked up the terminology and then put it to work for the model number of examples one that comes to mind a biologist in montana was awakened very early one morning we described this and also have a couple of drawings of it when he heard outside of his window not only his dog barking before sun up but someone calling here boy here boy and he thought good heavens it's five o'clock in the morning and went to sleep been a drag himself out he looks around and nothing to be seen except a barking dog goes back and and hears it once again here boy boy here this time when he goes out he discovers a crow on the fence of the candle lean over and calling the dog and course driving the dog nuts all right and he chases the crow off shaking his head he couldn't believe it himself and the crow over the period of the next two weeks makes its way to the campus of the university of montana still using the term here boy here boy and it's like the university of washington from time to time you see stray dogs and you know kind of friendly wandering around the crow would assemble these dogs under a tree with the crow up above calling here boy here boy the dog looking up to how are right now what what what back and forth and apparently you know you'd have to conclude there was some purpose in doing this over and over again to get the response from the dogs in the case of the kennel you might have argued the crow would distract the dog in a kennel and seize the kibble in the dish and then get out of there again in the case of the crow using that term to assemble the dogs on campus a little more difficult to determine what was behind it except when the classes let out on the campus the crow would fly off calling here boy here boy with all of the dogs and hot pursuit running through the students and creating chaos here and there on the caps and went on for a couple of weeks and you wonder well what's behind that does the crow have a sense of humor was a just interested in seeing what it could get the dogs to do were there any lunches spilled in the course of the students running for cover as these dogs pack a dog so charging behind the crow maybe and it could have been that  crow had discovered that it could pick up some scraps after chaos and but a number of examples my personal experience likewise with my raven macaw using my term hello macaw as a greeting routinely every morning when i go any greet me with a hello macaw and it was in context only used at that time and you had to conclude that these birds like parrots who are capable of using human terms in the context or in a reference to a particular object so that's part of the language of what we describe we also course do a neural biological look see at the brain to how these signals are sent through the auditory system of the crow and move through the brain looping picking up information refining a response to something in order to employ vocalization in a proper context and so there's there's a good deal of this biology as well i was surprised to read that the crows don't actually tongue really doesn't have anything to do with talking so leave the crows tongue alone if you're close enough to a crow that you'd like to hear it do something other than cawing because down in the throat itself below the forward portion of the throat where they swallow and the tongue assists in the swallowing there is this bifurcation or two sides to the voice box where they can articulate the sound deep in the throat and then that sound which is really a dual production if you will from those two sides of the throat moves up through the trachea if you will and then is vocalized and what you get is this two part harmony especially in song birds and crows and ravens are songbirds and capable of of singing as well as producing their usual calls and it's a very sophisticated process that we ordinarily don't realize until we look at the diagram that shows how that sound is produced and allows them to make these sophisticated  that otherwise would be impossible i can't remember the specifics of it but also in the book you had an example of where a camera with it was closer but where they modified the language where they recognized  the the question comes up and i'm going to take a little bit of his side translate if you will on that question because it was important for us to determine and especially in some of the examples we give does the crow and the kin of the crow have self awareness is it able to  itself as an individual and unique and indeed when you listen to particular individuals they have individual vocalisations that distinguish them but moreover some of the experiments with magpies for example have shown that if you put a spot of paint on the breasts of the magpie and it presents itself in a mirror it will look at not just see a reflection of what like another magpie to fight but sees itself and then using the mere will remove the spot off of his breast so this appears to be evidence that they have the self or in us like you and i would stand before a mirror and s shaved today because of the way we appear well they likewise over time apparently not necessarily the young birds but the older birds have the self awareness interesting the more i read your guys books and these realizations of all the advanced thinking that the corvids do you know i probably for that particular one you just gave an example of the next realisation will be well and i need to find out who put this spot on me and you know well they do hold grudges and they do remember faces and again john's work out at the university has demonstrated that really for the first time with great precision where they put a caveman mask on the individual when they banned the bird and when a bird is banned it after it's been netted on campus it's not an easy process for the bird it  doesn't feel comfortable being handled like that and it recognizes the face of of the crow handler if you will with this mascot so later on when that individual making the story a little simple we there's greater detail in the book but later on when the individual goes out on campus wearing the mask that particular person as you might expect is mobbed dramatically mobbed because the crows remember that face you could wear another mask and there was a control on that where they put a mask a dick cheney mask on an individual and walked out and crows didn't pay any attention to dick but go out with a caveman mask and they were in hot pursuit the remarkable thing is this is like and more years later these crows don't forget the caveman that handle them originally and also apparently have instructed their kin that this is an individual to fear so they transferred this information  threat to birds that never had any firsthand experience in this moment of being caught in captured and it's an ongoing experiments going to be interesting to see sense crows can live to be twenty years if they continue to if you will perpetuate the saga of the caveman as somebody on campus to to fear to several generations coming along the other thing i might mention here because i'm wanting to share what we discovered is the capacity for crows to use insight and that's something that you know we have reserved for people and perhaps the highest of the primates  but indeed the experimentation with the new caledonian crow has demonstrated that these birds who are terrific tool makers and tool users in the wild they are able to in the laboratory determine what tool is needed to get another tool which will then be used to get the food that they want and the experiment is a short stick tied on a string below a perch that will retrieve a longer stick that's behind a barrier that they can pull forward in then pull out of the barrier and that longer stick is needed to get the food out of a long tube this is the same crow that was famous in the videotape of being in a cage and having a tube with a little bucket of chow at the bottom and a piece of wire incense they in the wild betty is the birds name really knows how to bend sticks in one thing or another but he looks around sees the wire looks like a stem of some kind and goes down and tries to poke at the food at the bottom of this tube which he couldn't reach w doesn't work pulls out the wire looks at it for practically a split second puts the wire down underneath this piece of what is  bottom of the tube that secures it to to the cage and bends the wire by putting it down underneath this section and bends it pulls it out now she has a hook takes the hook puts it down in the middle of the tube hooks the top of the little bucket and pulls out the food well of course seen it is a lot better then then my telling it and we've got an illustration of the book that lays out pretty clear but there again the bird grasps the problem has experience as well as perhaps some innate inclination to bend things in order to make tools but then puts it to work in a laboratory situation and those laboratory experiences and have been done with bird after bird after bird and they solve the problem almost immediately and that's things that we normally might attribute let's say to primates  and be awed by that when they do it but this seems like a major leap forward in understanding of birds well yeah the irony of this is mike that for probably over one hundred years after a fellow in a laboratory in europe determined that the avian brain was so different than the mammalian brain that the avian brain made a bird just a creature of instinct it they were very different well of course they're different because they evolved even though they in paul evolved from a common ancestor the mammal brain evolved much earlier that common ancestor continued to evolve and then two hundred million years later you know the bird emerges from that common ancestor with a different brain and it has all of the same equipment but configured differently well the scientist who was doing the examination just said well  the bird really isn't doing any thinking it's just innately inclined creature of instinct and it's ironic that he would say that because he was surrounded by ravens and rocks and magpies that were doing great things out of the lab so you know he didn't coin the term bird brain but it came out of those studies and lasted for one hundred years and only in the last thirty years and right here at the university of kant washington campus great  studies are going on looking at the brain and remarkable revelations about how they think and how they operate well talk a bit another one of your sections is passion raf and curry if emotions can you talk about that sure well the passion raff and grief stick with the with the grief example a low all of us i think of heard mobbing crows and which a collection is called a murder of crows and you can imagine why when that way they get cranked up over a predator in their neighborhood but the grief issue is is kind of interesting because among other things we've got all this beat back from around again around the world about crow funerals and john and i have both witnessed such an event if you will where a dead crow is surrounded by companions that  look at it examine it maybe even tug a little bit on it and then will fly back and join the flock and there's some vocalization associated with it but it's generally a fairly solemn  connection associated with this whole you never know you know i'm joking the the fact that that some of the same things are going on with this crow moment at my as might go on with with a human moment where you're paying homage to a deceased companion or relative or someone in your community and getting information if you will because the social structure of the crow community will change with the death of that particular crow and that cr may be trying to figure out now what does this mean to me this was the mate of the other crow now that other crow is without a mate and he or she is now available and that may have been a dominant crow that died and the hierarchy and positioning of the crows will be adjusted because of that you also scuse me you also know that the crow is trying to figure out what happened here is it dangerous to me is this a place to avoid so the information is coming in that's very important to the crows future and that that's what appears to be grief and there again we don't entirely kno that grief is absent from this because as this brain research goes on there are ways to measure whether or not there's grief involved because there's portions of the bird brain that will if you will light up when when there's that response there's a memory that that is triggered there something that causes a chemical change in the in the bird's disposition but that's still being measured we speculate on it  don't have the final answers but it's interesting to explore how do they check on that with birds they put them in a little m r i or something and well they do as they scan them and they gone in to the scanner with  caveman mask and then with that trace or in the system it is put under it goes in to the scanner and where the brain was active at that moment there is still an indication and it shows up on the scanner what was was going on what portion of the brain the hippocampus may well have been a memory area that was lit up and it was in fact because of a memory of that particular mask in we know that there was recognition there and then some other portion of the brain clicks in and is also with that trace element shown on the scanner to be active as as a fear area and we know then from that evidence what kinds of information is put together for the crow to to respond and by the way of course they respond so quickly to a lot of what we do that we sometimes think they're reading they're more our mind you know we make a motion we look in some direction and they they read the body language and i think part of that is the co evolution argument that we make in our first book the company of crows and ravens where they've had hundreds of thousands of years of association with humankind in  one form or another civilised and uncivilised around the camps of humans and they have basically grown up with us because they see that humans can work to their advantage they can scavenge they can be from the from the kills of people garbage dumps now garbage cans drive ins you know the whole evolutionary line of association his has given the crow the jump on really being familiar with who we are and how we move and operate and that's why the crow population around here has increased several orders of magnitude since the one nine hundred fifty s and sixty's because they're able to exploit the disturbed habitats of the area in a front lawn during breeding season to a crow is like a supermarket so you'll see pears walking back and forth when you drive through the neighborhood today check it out because they're they'll be busy and of course they only move out of the way of your car at the last minute because they they are very familiar with how speed effects and sound effects because of their old sensory system their behavior and they know how to how to move in and out of that activity and as you touched on earlier they can remember those who have treated them well and those who haven't they not only remember bring in to the world of the crow is it is probably one that the crow knows better than you do and if you're a friend you're going to be on the receiving end of a lot of attention as well the hostility is gone and there are a lot of folks that we have gotten to know who have actually because they'd be offended that be friended the crow receive gifts hence the name which is both literal and metaphorical literally received gifts on their bird feeders or if they feed them out in the community the crow drop something at their feet and you wonder what is going on here reciprocity we know that there is some gifting between crow to crow to a degree but crow to humans well it appears that there's something pretty serious going on because once again it's it goes on continuously in a lots of different communities from lots of people who are not just making it up and we run it through a set of questions and you know is are they kidding us are they serious are they you know making observations that are accurate what and we come up i think with some pretty solid proof that there's serious if you will gifting and exchange and why wouldn't they i mean if you say what's behind this if if they could make a gesture that would either enhanced or prime the pump if you will on something that's coming back to them it stands to reason and food is you know ultimately very very important to them why wouldn't they possibly leave something that could work on their behalf so the other part of the gifting is that we feel that here's a bird that has settled into our lives we think there's a middle ground between loving them and hating them and that's admiring them respecting them trying to understand them because they're slow full of dynamic expression and activity and an endless array of behaviors at least two you know my and observations and john's and a lot of other people and they provide lessons about nature the whole animal behavior spectrum is there in the crow and i think as we understand the behavior of other animals i think we better understand the behavior of ourselves and that's one of the