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Crows, electricity and resiliency

This past weekend on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) an episode, “A Murder of Crows,” of the show series Nature focused on research related to the behavior of crows. Due to the fact that crows have an equivalent brain size more closely representative of primates than other animals, crows have high levels of intelligence. Their intelligence allows them to be resilient and use multi-step problem solving skills. As noted in the documentary, crows are social animals that play, mourn death, and pick monogamous mates for life.

One interesting story form the movie with an energy slant is that the crows in Japan use wire clothes hangers for making nests. And crows nest in many places given the scarcity of good trees in the cities. One of these nesting locations is often among power lines and transformers. Put wire meshes together with electricity, and that creates an obvious recipe for disaster for the crows and reliability for electricity. So much has this become a problem that one utility has created a dedicated team of employees that travel power lines in search of crow nests to clear. This nest-clearing is not the normal task that one imagines in estimating operation and maintenance costs for operating a utility electric grid, but it shows the resiliency of nature to cause problems for humans. It seems the term “smart grid” is turned on its head in this case as a smart animal is making use of our trash to rewire the grid for us.

Posted by Carey King on October 26, 2010 4:44 AM | Permalink