Intelligence of crows

I bought some fried chicken and sat down in the park to eat it. There was a crow on a tree, who kept barking at me, wanting some of that chicken. So as I ate, I threw bits and bones unto the grass, but the crow was afraid to come too close. When I was done and walked away I looked back: the crow and her/his friend got down to the feast.

Here is the interesting thing: Before that event, every time I went outside I got crows barking at me as if unhappy, which I felt wasn't personal, but the way they felt about most humans. As I was walking to the bus the next day crows looked at me quite friendly and didn't make any noise. Like as if that one crow got the message out to others that I was cool.

I read about an interesting experiment where scientists put some food in a bottle and let a crow get it. After a bit of frustrating fighting the bottle the crow went and got a piece of wire and bent the end of it into a hook and then got the food out with it.

My grandma told me a cool story of something that happened when she was a kid: At her aunt's summer house they had a hand washing thing set up outside - a bucket with a hole in the bottom with a metal stick with a round ball on the end, which you lifted to get the water to poor, and a dish of soap. The soap kept disappearing, and everyone was wondering who was stealing it. My grandma hid in the bushes once and watched the soap dish. She saw the crow come and take the soap and fly away, and my grandma followed. She saw the crow put the soap into the hole in a tree. The girl went back and told her aunt about it. She followed the girl with a ladder and found a big hole in a tree full of soap, not just theirs, but a bunch more. Besides the soaps there were some silver spoons too and a bunch of pretty candy wrappers. They took all the soaps and spoons back to their house and never left it outside again. That crow didn't use the soap to wash her feet, obviously, she stole the soap simply for aesthetic reasons - she liked the colors, the smell, the feel. Apparently crows enjoy pretty things just as much as people do and often steal them just to collect them.