REAL libraries, and crows with coins

Keith, my husband, sent me this link: Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. Yeah, baby. For lovers of books or Europe or the Middle Ages or any two of those, these photos are HOT. Holy cow. I want to be there, I want to DO that.
Samples:

   

Not being able to poke around the libraries, I poked around the blog, and found Crows and Coins, photo-commentary (with captions upon commentary) of crows with coins, and what they must (or might possibly, but probably not) be thinking!

      

And that's all commentary on this:

The Goal

The goal of this project is to create a device that will autonomously train crows. So far we've trained captive crows to deposit dropped coins they find on the ground in exchange for peanuts. The next step is to see how quickly we can get wild crows to learn the system, and then how quickly they can learn it from each other.

Once we've got system down for teaching coin collection we'll move to seeing how flexibly they can learn *other* tasks, like collecting garbage, sorting through discarded electronics, or maybe even search and rescue. The crows continue to amaze us with their abilities, so who knows?

In the meantime, the idea of mutually beneficial synanthropy is gaining ground. That's the concept that we can have mutually beneficial relationships with animals adapted to human ecologies. We're doing some consulting with companies that have animal-related problems to find animal-related solutions - instead of just bombing, shooting, or poisoning them.

Comments on comments on connections on connections!