Dan MaloneyHi everyone, welcome to Hack Chat today. I'm Dan and I'll be moderating for Hans Forsberg, who has been doing some interesting work exploring animal intelligence. @hfor62, are you online yet?
You don't fix the tapes first?
I think you forgot resistors for those leds
It's time for birds!
Bird hacking -- wait, it's not Thanksgiving yet...
Hi there I'm online
don't confuse bird hacking and hacking birds
avian flu
Avians Fly
khe khe
Hi Hans, welcome to the Hack Chat. Can you start things off with a little about how you got into this area?
Yes!
When I turned six, I got an electric construction box. Since then, I have been enchanted by electricity, electronics and computers.
Through a long professional career, I now have the opportunity to work with smart colleagues and together we apply AI and
machine-learning to real applications such as robotic lawnmowers.
When I turned six, I got an electric construction box. Since then, I have been enchanted by electricity, electronics and computers.
Through a long professional career, I now have the opportunity to work with smart colleagues and together we apply AI and
machine-learning to real applications such as robotic lawnmowers.
Anyway, most of what I have created has been further development
of existing solutions, quite naturally, but when I saw our garden magpie-pair unlock the rather complicated locking
mechanism in the lanterns we exhibited in the winter darkness, my curiosity was aroused. The magpies were looking for the
paraffin candles that were in the lanterns, could I challenge the magpies to solve missions?
Finally a hobby project where I got to start from scratch. There were no how-to's to google here, it was entirely up to me!
At the same time, a hot topic with a lot of ongoing research:
Interesting, wonder why they wanted the candles
Here are two interesting articles about corvids
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/02/new-caledonian-crows-plan-ahead-with-tools/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191211-crows-could-be-the-smartest-animal-other-than-primates
I think the candle (IKEA) are pure paraffine...rocket fule for birds as long as vegetarian..
There is so much to say about the magpies, We have had a beautiful pair in the garden ever since we bought the
house 20 years ago...yes i understand the birds are not the same...it looks even more complicated...
I liked one of the suggestions someone had that you train them to pick up coins instead of bottlecaps. Though you might get into trouble when they realize that people carry said coins.
I chose that picture of the magpie because you can just tell by looking at them that there's a lot going on inside that tiny brain.
Build a tiny vending machine, let them pick the snacks
Can you post a view of the bird box from further back so we can see the entire structure? I've seen the close up images of the deck but wanted to see the hopper at the top that delivers the food.
Over here there arent much coins any longer
Bitcoins then
A different sort of bitcoin mining, eh?
Right. initial IPO 100 million
Thanks Hans!
corvids are the only animals we know that can recognize humans by their faces
I'll try to find an image of the complete upper box
I had a pair of 'pies nest in the tree outside my bedroom window and they were a pain, they yelled at me every morning and evening for turning on lights in the room.
They built a fence in front of the nest in the end. ;-)
Won't be long before the birds figure out how to just get at the booty in the top I suspect!
Have you everheard of the young girl ho fed crows, and got gifts back.
Vaguely familiar. Was it one of Aesop's fables?
A few weeks ago, suddeny there was an old rust M4 bolt close to the place where the food is dispensed...
I saw that, it was great!
No... more like this some 5 years ago...
You should try to get them to do this --- just little nice looking things in general. Coins, bottlecaps, etc. Maybe you'll get a ring or two.
Yes, and another day...some magpie gave a small piece of cristmas decoration from last yer...
whar will come...
Did you see the kickstarter that was about identifying birds at a feeder?
Actueally, the surroundings is quite clean
Not much vaste
Maybe they'll pick stuff up from further away though
So i have to hide bottlecaps in the garden
Amazing project! I'm curious how you came up with using the vibration dispensing mechanism instead of some type of rotating hopper - can you comment on the pros/cons of this mechanism?
they easily pic 50-60 a day
It's interesting that those crows only really seemed to return "treasures", as opposed to random garbage like cigarette butts and such. Unless the humans edited out the junk, that's pretty discriminating behavior
I tried more ore lees all 'screw-mechanism' pet feeder style alternatives from thingiverse...useless...stuck and jam
the vibrating solution is what they use in industri...foolprof
there is lots of folk tales about magpies "stealing" small objects
Thats the type of experience i want to share with you...
of course they don't have any idea of ownership, so they can't really steal
they just collect
Yes...magpies has a lot of stories in 'folklore *
Any sign that the vibrations from the feeder scared the birds? Probably would initially, I'd think.
Now, really, o was conidering if they could carry apples from my lawn...
you need to train hedgehogs for that
But that season is already to an end...
Seems like it has to be covids or maybe squirrels
eels
electric ones
Even raccoons and pigs have been trained
How about training them to voluntarily wear cameras for a little while?
You can even train c. elegans, nematodes with 302 neurons
I have some contact with a professor in this topic at Stockholm university
get them to like a food that normally means danger
This professor, asked me to watch out for a strange behaviour
Pigs and raccoons tend to look at the 'payment' as food aftera while
Lika a internal battle in the brain between genetic codes, and new stuff they had learned...
No such problems with magpies
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.160734
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181777
My original experiments has been with an adult pair last winter and early this spring. They are quite neophobic so I had to have
patience...slightest change in the rig or equipment, and the adults were suspicious for a day or so.... this has been the
birds I ‘have worked with for a few years
How exactly did you train them?
But this spring, four chicks where hatched, and these chicks (the nest is in a cherry three close to the machine..)
started to investigate the machine, after a while the adult-parents were gone...haven't seen them since. The chicks are more
brave, almost stupid as teenagers...one walked straight into our kitchen. The parents knew some tricks, like pushing a
special red button to get a reward, but as I said, now it's the chicks from the spring that is operating the machine.
But this spring, four chicks where hatched, and these chicks (the nest is in a cherry three close to the machine..)
started to investigate the machine, after a while the adult-parents were gone...haven't seen them since. The chicks are more
brave
There is a quite new video explaining this
i arranged a setup where the birds accidentally forced bottlecaps into a hole, and got a reward
Are you worried at all that your birds are being conditioned to get their foods from humans, and won't know how to properly forage once you stop feeding them?
Since you said they learned as young chicks
Not really, the seems to be to smart for that.
From time to time the dissaper for a whole day or more...probably seeking food somewhere else
and that even if the garden is full of bottlecaps
Everyone likes variety
But a feed the with a mix of peanuts, dog -food, and cat food
Trail mix for birds
The seem to have a rather small territory, lika a few houses around mine
Have a look for yourselfs when you drive around urban areas, how often do you spot magpies.
Magpies are not as famous for intelligence as eg caledonian crow...
Never, because I live in US
Just reading about their nesting and territorial behaviors now, interesting birds
So I wonder if this is possible with the dumb sparrows that live around me instead
But, since the seem to stay in a small territory, the are easy to work with and super curious
Sorry...dont think so.
I've only seen them in Colorado. I live in West Texas and the only birds we have a lot of here are doves, buzzards, robins, blue jays and mocking birds. There are some grackles, but they hang out in fast food parking lots because they are junk food junkies.
In ealy experiments, the birds had to lif a acrylic 'see-through' lid to get the rewar, and for me to detect the action
@Ahron Wayne - we have them out west. Strikingly beautiful birds, I was so pleased to see a species I'd never seen before after living back East for all my life
There where small sparrows and other porr birrds lokking through the glass understanding nada
Here in scandinavia we have the eurasian magpie
Actually, and quite surprisingly, right now, it seems like there is only one of three chicks that can handle the bottle-cap trick...
the others are trying to steal the reward.
'
Ours in the Rockies are the black-billed magpie, which is virtually identical in appearance and behavior
Another, really unexpected experience:
you really need corvids or parrots
they are the only birds that have neocortex
Then there was a hostile take-over of the territory with some really interesting observations, but I’ll leave that for now…
Suddenly, a friday afternoon, and a journalist from Swedish national radio was planned to visit my garden the next monday, there was a big fight in the cherry-tree close to the birdbox. Several magpies 6-8, where fighting wildly...The next day...the box was dead. No more bottle-caps collected
:(
funnily, there are some fish that have it too
The most likely explanation is that another gang of three ‘new’ magpies had conquered the territory from the original gang of three magpie chicks.
so you could probably train a goldfish
Oh man, that probably set you back a bit
Did you share that story with your professor acquaintance?
Do you think you could recognize the individual birds (by yourself or with AI)? After all, it's not fair that we label them as smart when they can recognize us but we can't do the same with them
There 'was' an old correlation between the size of the brain and intelligence...exept elephants...
size of brain in proportion to the body
The corvids has a brain with the size of a nut
and a body with the size of a corvid
Actually, the neurons in the corvid brain is tighter packed
One wonder at what price...you almost never gets something for free from Darwin
constant weltschmertz probably
I could separeta the birds as chicks, as their colors was vage and more or less dense...but now it's really hard
The biggest problem is that we can never really ask these animals. Who knows how intelligent a 200 year old sperm whale really is?
@hfor62 may be interesting to photograph them in UV, they are not black then
Since it semms like there is only one out of tree birds doing the trick i wonder it thas the female...
their sight it shifted towards the uv spectrum, and they don't see each other as black
But distinguishing between the gender seems to be possibel only when the mate or hatch
Try putting a UV pass filter on your camera then?
Ok, UV you say, i'll give that a try.
I have a Google-Coral -raspberry setup that can classify 1000 species of bird, so maybe training your own network could work...but still, we have to annotate the training data catch 22
Do you think the same network could be used on insects?
Would be interesting to setup a general classification tool, such as an AI-camera
Black-billed magpies here in the US are often seen picking ticks off cattle. I wonder if that behavior could be leveraged somehow to do useful work
viewed with a usb microscope
The google Coral alredy provides a insect network
oooh
As well a plant network
Cool, thanks, taking a look
In norther europe we currently have huge problem with a small Work/caterpillar or whatever you would call this 3 mm insect, totally destroing our pinewoods
That would be a challange for tons of trained birds, and tons of peanuts...
But for the general detector i suess i still have to train a network myself
Cigarett-buts and garden slugs is on my list
Really hard to keep ahead of insect infestations, they're so prolific and so tiny.
The huge image net has almost any training data you could ask for.
But, still, retraining a neural network is simpel in theory...but more like a craftmanship in reality
Bird filmed recycling plastic bottle
A remarkable viral video shows a raven collecting an empty plastic drinks bottle and taking it to a recycling bin where it deposits it before flying away, leaving the world a slightly tidier place. The white-necked raven was seen doing its bit for the planet at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida.
Found an image of the 'bird-detector i was taking about, an RPI + Coral, a small camera in front and the result ona a display
I just joined and don't know if you already answered this: How did you get the birds to catch on the idea in the first place?
I arranged bottlecaps in a way that the accidentally forced them into a hole...and then got reward
Then yet a step
A step wher they had to 'lift' the bottle cap into the hole
So literally "a step"
then placing the bottle caps on the ground etc etc
Regarding the footage above with birds and PET bottles...
I'm considering going for soda cans next...2 Swedish krona each
Soda cans could also be classified with a metaldetector.
Any idea how much payload they can carry? And no jokes about coconuts, anyone...
Of course it would be cool with an AI based multipurpose classifier, but i'm old enough (or to bad engineer) to know to keep things simple and take small steps forward...
I have no idea what the can carry...the are quite bad flyers...or not, the fly as good as the need...
But i colud put the calssifier on the ground if they took care of my 'fall-fruit' thats messing with the robo-mover
Yeah, they're not gracefull, are they? Big birds, though, lots of wing area -- bet they can lift a lot. They've been known to move their eggs if the nest is disturbed, so they can carry at tleast as much as the egg weighs.
By the way...i have work 15 years with robotic lawnmovers, but thats another hack-chat maybe...
What if 2 birds use a sling?
Yes, definitely!
Now we are talking
That video-clip would finally make me a YouTuber
@Nicolas Tremblay - don't get us started...
Think i told
think i told you about the territory takeover
Thats another example of unexpected surprises from mother nature.
I was telling a friend about an article I read a few weeks ago, parrots...
There was an experiment done where they were given tokens to exchange for food, similar to the experiment with apes and money. Anyway, the birds were given equal amounts of tokens to exchange for food, and then when they had learned this as a group certain birds were given excess tokens and others none.
Well as it turned out the birds with excess tokens donated them to birds with none, so the community as a whole got fed. The apes learned to use their tokens to exchange for sex/status in comparison. I cant find the article or I'd post it, it was rather interesting.
Well, it's been a fast hour, and a fascinating one at that. Hans, thanks so much for making time for us and talking about this project. It's a little outside our usual fare but still really cool stuff. And I'm going to make a note to invite you back on in 2021 for a chat about robotic lawnmowers.
Really interesting, and some animals also managed the trick of 'waiting for a while' , not eating the tasty bit...and get twice the amount if they wait...
Thanks Hans, and sign me up for the robo-mower
Thanks Dan, my pleasure
Yeah thanks, that was fascinating :-)
I'will post more material, plans code etc on Hackaday, along with more video on YouTube
Thanks everyone for the great chat. Don't forget next week we'll have everyone's favorite artisenal Nixie tube maker Dalibor Farny:
https://hackaday.io/event/175084-the-art-of-nixies-hack-chat
