Behind a thatched pub in the village of Madingley near Cambridge, UK, is a set of aviaries that is home to 25 jays and seven rooks.
For Nicola Clayton, who set up the facility 22 years ago, these birds offer a unique window into the minds of other creatures. But not, perhaps, for much longer.
Clayton鈥檚 Comparative Cognition Lab 鈥� or, as she dubs it, the corvid palace 鈥� is set to close in July due to a depressing confluence of circumstances. 鈥淚t is so sad that this is happening now, especially given there are so many unanswered questions,鈥� says Clayton.
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She and her team at the University of Cambridge applied to renew the European Research Council grant that financed the facility during the Brexit negotiations, a time of great uncertainty for research funding, and their application was unsuccessful.
On top of this, the economic pressures of the covid-19 pandemic mean that the 拢75,000 per year it takes to run the aviaries just isn鈥檛 available. 鈥淏rexit was certainly a contributing factor, and it was not helped by the pandemic,鈥� says Clayton, though she is still holding out hope that a benefactor can be found at the eleventh hour.
The Madingley site has a long pedigree in the field of animal behaviour: for example, it was where the primatologist Jane Goodall was based for her PhD on chimpanzees in the 1960s.
In the years since the corvid lab was founded, studies here have revealed how these birds 鈥� members of the crow family 鈥� can perform feats once thought to be the domain of only humans or great apes, including planning for the future and understanding the minds of others.
Here, it was discovered that , and even work cooperatively to pull strings to obtain a treat. Research at the lab has also shown that corvids engage in mental time travel, showing an ability to remember the past and use this to plan for the future. Corvids can recall which other birds were watching when they hid food in caches, then use this experience to imagine and plan how to protect their caches for future recovery.
One of the stars of this facility, a Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) called Jaylo, flies over to take a prized treat, a waxworm, from my hand. She was part of a led by Elias Garcia-Pelegrin, also at the University of Cambridge, that used magic to probe the perceptions and expectations of these creatures. 鈥淚t is another way to test for their abilities in the absence of language,鈥� says Clayton.
These studies are part of a renaissance in our understanding of the cognition of other creatures, with sophisticated mental abilities being discovered not only in rooks and jays, but also other birds, such as parrots, plus cephalopods like octopuses and squid. But there is still much more to learn.
On my visit to the corvid palace, I also meet the rooks that are taking part in a groundbreaking study into how these birds understand language, something that is little known in non-mammalian animals. Francesca Cornero has already trained an 18-year-old rook named Leo plus two others to respond to different commands 鈥� speak, come here and wait 鈥� and is now teasing apart whether they are responding to the words themselves or other inadvertent cues, such as eye gaze or body language.
Clayton also wants to explore something called source memory, questioning how the birds came to know how they know something 鈥� for example, whether they found out about the cache made by another bird due to a smell or a sound.
Another promising avenue is embodied cognition, in which our bodies influence the way we think about the world. 鈥淏oth humans and apes have hands, and this influences the way we see the world, so how is embodied cognition different for birds?鈥� says Clayton.
Sadly, these studies are unlikely to happen. Not here, anyway.
What will happen to the birds? It looks like the rooks might be found a home at another lab in Strasbourg, France, so the research on them can continue. The younger jays might be released to the wild and are being trained accordingly. Clayton is hopeful that homes can be found for the older ones 鈥� though finding people with the space available for suitable large aviaries is challenging.
Clayton has already begun to branch out to work on the cognitive abilities of cephalopods, but she is heartbroken that the long-term relationships she has built up with these hand-raised birds are coming to an end. 鈥淚f it was rats or pigeons or mice, it would be so much easier because there would be a lot of other facilities where they could be housed, and also you could easily get new ones,鈥� she says. 鈥淏ut for these really clever birds that live a long time, if it closes down, that鈥檚 it.鈥�
