When an Amsterdam-based startup announced last year that it was training crows to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for food, the concept seemed a little ridiculous, but not because crows aren’t smart enough to pull it off. Corvids are among the most intelligent animals in the world, routinely shocking scientists with their reasoning skills, and they’re already known for snatching cigarettes right out of people’s hands. It’s the concept of training animals to clean up our messes that has many people shaking their heads, though it’s arguably a symbiotic transaction.

As it turns out, we don’t even have to wait for the results of the Crowded Cities experiment, which uses a ‘crow vending machine’ to reward the birds for collecting and depositing cigarette butts. A French theme park called Puy du Fou began its own crow cleanup crew project, employing six birds to pick up butts and other bits of rubbish and insert them into a small box.

“The goal is not just to clear up, because the visitors are generally careful to keep things clean,” says Nicolas de Villiers, head of the park. It’s also about proving “that nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment.”

The crows received their training from the park’s “Academy of Falconry,” and the pickup project is inspired by the park’s falconry show, in which crows retrieve roses and deliver them to a “princess” in a castle. The falconer keeps an eye on the situation to make sure tourists don’t drop trash just for the crows to retrieve, and keeps the birds from cheating by dropping objects other than trash into the box.

Top image: Steve Baker via Flickr CC by 2.0

Each year, trillions of cigarette butts are thrown on the streets of cities worldwide, but what if a highly intelligent urban creature could be trained to pick them up, and even be automatically given a treat for their troubles?

Crows are adept learners, able to use tools and think outside the box. Notably, they have already been trained to use specialized ‘vending machines’ in which they receive food for depositing a coin. By extension, butts could be the new coin of the urban crow realm.

Cities have tried all kinds of things to get smokers to stop discarding butts on the ground, including ‘ballot bins’ letting them vote for favorite sports teams as well as light-up and musical garbage cans. Alas, humans are tricky to train, and not always very responsible.

But crows are another matter — not only can they learn to perform tasks, but they can also pass their knowledge onto others of their species. Through this kind of viral education, Crowded Cities, an Amsterdam-based startup, thinks they could be the future of litter collection.

Inspired by the work of Joshua Klein, who had created the first crow vending machine, they began to explore the idea of using that same principle but with a different behavioral target. In the prototype, birds learned they could pick up a coin, put it in the device and get a peanut.

Crowded Cities is working in the same way with Crowbar, a gadget that features a ‘butt drop’ funnel, camera to verify that the deposited item is indeed litter, and treats given out on success.

Before they fully execute, however, they are doing more research to ensure that crows won’t be harmed in the process of collecting and dropping off butts. Some might also question the ethics of enlisting animals to clean up our messes (though others might call it a kind of symbiosis).

“It may turn out that crows can handle cigarette butts with no harm at all, in which case both crows and humans could benefit,” says one of the designers. “That’s the kind of solution I’m looking for.”

“Crows aren’t going away anytime soon, and it’d be nice to find a way for us to work cooperatively.” In the end, the project is also about raising awareness — perhaps simply knowing they could be called ‘dumber than a crow’ will encourage some smokers to be more civic-minded.

Working to raise awareness of litter, Buttsy builds sculptural collages out of found objects, with a strong emphasis on some of the most toxic offenders: cigarette butts. Like Banksy, he works quietly and invisibly in the night.

They may seem small, but butts create over one and a half billion pounds of trash per year. And while society has gotten better about shaming those who toss them on the street, we could still do more. To that end, Buttsy has begun shaping butts out of butts, as it were.

“A lot of my friends and people who work in my industry [advertising] smoke, and they just leave their butts everywhere,” Landon Beamer, a.k.a. Buttsy, told the CityPages. “I think that for some reason they don’t see it as trash, but I’ve been very aware of it. That’s why I decided to find a way to make people look at their butts differently.”

Based in Minnesota, Beamer has put out dozens of work around the Twin Cities, tying into different pop culture themes and using what he finds along the way. He has also lived in Boston and Seattle, and is considering taking his project on the road — and anywhere he goes, there are sure to be butts.