A few years ago I visited Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli in Welsh) just off the Llŷn Peninsula in north Wales. A wonderful place to watch birds.

One very windy afternoon, whilst most of my friends were sea-watching in some of the hides dotted around the island, I found myself pretty much landlocked, right in the middle. I was captivated, finding myself stuck to the spot watching two crows as they seemed to be dancing in the air, flitting between half a dozen pine trees.

Eventually I realised what they were doing. Up to then, we’d had fairly calm days, and the crows were nowhere to be seen. Now that the wind had whipped up to a frenzy, the two corvids had seized on a feeding opportunity. At the very tops of the trees there were young pine cones - soft and very much edible.

Of course, crows can’t hover in the same place to feed like hummingbirds can, and even if they could, it would take more calories to do so than they could ever replace with the food they would consume. The avian equivalent of the old celery conundrum. With 40mph wind though, they could.

Using supreme aerobatic skills that would put the best glider pilot to shame, the birds were able to stay motionless in the same bit of airspace long enough to nibble the pine cones away. Micro-adjustments of rudder, flaps, ailerons - sorry, tail feathers, primary and flight feathers, calculated and executed in nano-seconds, minimum calorie expenditure. I didn’t see many storm petrels that day, but I did witness some of the best precision flying that I’ve ever seen.

Whilst most of the UK was battered by storms and heavy rain last week, we kept a close eye on the osprey nest and the surrounding Dyfi River. Thankfully, no damage to report.

We’re hoping to have the osprey cameras on Live Stream 365 days a year from this spring onwards, so what better way of testing them than to have them take the full force of the January storms. They passed and with flying colours. In fact, they performed better than they do in the summer because the rain kept cleaning the camera domes!

About a week ago, we recorded this..

What is going on here?

We’re coming up to the breeding season, that's true. Is this just an example of pair bonding by one bird preening another, or is there something else going on here, something more complex?

It has been known for some years now that many crow species exhibit what is known as ‘mutual aid’.  Was the crow on the left giving medical care to the bird on the right by deliberately removing a parasite or some gunk from the eye of the other?

‘Reciprocal altruism' is a behaviour whereby an animal acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another animal's fitness, with the expectation that the other individual will act in a similar manner at a later time. For example, another corvid, the jay, is known to give a loud screeching alarm call from a tree perch when it sees a predator. This warning call, although exposing the bird and putting it in momentary danger, might save its life one day if it is alerted to a predator that this time it hadn’t seen, by another jay.

Charles Darwin struggled with altruism. He witnessed it in many species, but it was a thorn in his side. How could his theory of natural selection based on out-competing your peers and being ‘fitter' than them, accommodate any kind of helping your fellow competitor? "Species are pitted against species for shared resources, similar species with similar needs and niches even more so, and individuals within species most of all”, he said.

More complex behaviours such as reciprocal altruism still fit within Darwin’s theory of evolution, and fit very well. What Darwin didn’t know of course was the technical process of inheritance. If he had known about genes, chromosomes and DNA, he might have clicked. It took another 100 years after Darwin published his “Origin of Species” before a couple of molecular biologists hit upon one of the greatest discoveries in science in Cambridge in 1953.  

Crows are fascinating animals. They’re the only non-mammal species in the world to be able to recognise themselves in a mirror. They have a brain-to-weight ratio similar to that of the great apes. Did you hear about the crow that worked out how a pelican crossing worked?

It would leave nuts on the road, wait for passing cars to drive over them, wait for the red light and the cars to stop, and then hop back on the road and eat the now accessible nuts in a 10 second window of safety.

There’s no question that this much maligned bird is one of the most intelligent animals on earth. As we wait for some other feathered birds to arrive back from their holidays, next time you’re out and about and see some crows, take a closer look at what they’re doing. Things might be a lot less simple than you think.