Dr. Fionn Ó Marcaigh

That's right, definitely.

It's always important to have a handle on the trends in common species as well as the uncommon ones.

Because I suppose every species that's ended up being uncommon or rare wasn't always as uncommon or rare as it is now.

In a lot of cases, things can be common until they aren't anymore, you know.

So it's always important to keep an eye out.

It's brilliant, yeah, they're extremely social and they'll be sort of foraging out around in the area and you'll see them go around in groups.

They're so intelligent that they are even aware of humans in a way that I think a lot of birds aren't.

There have been times when I've been counting these colonies and I've been standing in one area and a rook has come down quite close to me, maybe landed kind of behind me and been grand, but then if it sees me kind of look at it, it suddenly realises...

I'm paying attention and it retreats a little bit then.

The way that a dog or another animal that's very attuned to humans is, they're aware of where our sight lines are and what we're thinking about and what we're paying attention to.

Yes, there's been really interesting ones.

There was a gas one with the American crows where they wore these masks while they were bringing birds on a university campus.

And then when they came back to the same area and wore the same mask, that was recognised as a human face by the birds in the area, even ones that hadn't hatched yet at the time when that research was originally done.

So there was something being communicated from generation to generation about a person with a certain appearance being a threat to them and that they would act hostile towards those people then.

They're really intelligent animals.

They're probably the most intelligent of the bird species.

Well, corvids in general, yeah, they're amazing.

Their brains are very advanced, but in a slightly different way from ours, the structure.

It's kind of an example of convergent evolution.

The brain is structured differently, but still produces this really high level of cognitive ability that's kind of following a different path evolutionarily a little bit.