Yes, I can barely remember where I heard it but on this show I watched a while back they said that Crows were right under Dolphins in animal Intelligence and everyone knows how smart Dolphins are. But the reason is because Crows have the ability to mimic other animals (as well as humans), the crow on there could shift a standard transmission in a car so thats pretty smart.

As a group, the crows show remarkable examples of intelligence, with Aesop's fable of The Crow and the Pitcher showing that humans have long viewed the crow as an intelligent animal. They top the avian IQ scale[1]. Crows and ravens often score very highly on intelligence tests. Crows in the northwestern U.S. (a blend of Corvus brachyrhynchos and Corvus caurinus) show modest linguistic capabilities and the ability to relay information over great distances, live in complex, hierarchic societies involving hundreds of individuals with various "occupations", and have an intense rivalry with the area's less socially advanced ravens. One species, the New Caledonian Crow, has recently been intensively studied because of its ability to manufacture and use its own tools in the day-to-day search for food. Wild hooded crows in Israel have learned to use bread crumbs for bait-fishing. Crows will engage in a kind of midair jousting, or air-"chicken" to establish pecking order. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow#Behavior

About Five years ago there was a story in The Daily Yomiuri about crows in Tokyo, Japan, that had taken up the habit of commuting between the suburbs and the city each day. Bird experts say that this started a few years ago when the crow population of Tokyo’s parks and temple grounds grew so large that crows were forced to build nests elsewhere. It was then that they discovered the comforts of suburban life. The one thing they missed, though, was sophisticated city food—garbage and discarded leftovers. They overcame this problem by developing “commuting patterns that are similar to that of salaried workers. “They fly to urban areas in the morning to search for food then return to the suburbs in the evening.”

Yes, I saw a documentary, which showed a crow that figured out if you drop a nut into a crosswalk cars will run over it then crack open the nut. Then when the cars stop, it just goes into the crosswalk and eats the nut. Very smart I believe.

Where to begin... I suppose that I should speak of my own experiences rather than everything I've read. It took me weeks to attract my first crow to my backyard. I was desperate, so i made a "box" out of tinfoil and placed dog food inside. And there he was, like a child drawn in by a shiney object. So the next day I go outside to look for more crows, and the neighbor's roof catches my eye. The crow marked the neighbor's roof with the tinfoil so he'd find his way back for more free hand outs! These guys are so clever, never letting me have the upper hand in our relationship. When i first started getting to know them i would never see them take the food i left for them unless i hid and peeked out the window like a stalker. If they don't want to be seen, you wont see them, and if they do want you to see them, then maybe you've made a friend. They recognize people as individuals and remember you, so that means you probably want to be on their good side or you'll end up like the college students at the University of Washington who netted crows for research. Whenever the students who did the netting would walk on campus, they found themselves having to duck and dodge the angry crows that were dive bombing them. I'm happy to report that whenever my crows are circling me it's to mark me as territory, not to harm me. I my heart belongs to these birds, and frankly, if they were as dumb as a chickadee or a parasitic cow bird, then I would have never discovered the world of birds. P.S. Crows can count.

They're pretty bright. There was an experiment run a few years ago with two ravens (one male named Abel and one female named Betty). There were morsels of meat stuffed down into test tubes and they had to decide which of two wire tools (one straight, one with a hook on the end) to use. The hooked one was the correct one, but the male knocked it off the table. Betty then grabbed the straight one and actually bent it to make a hook in the shape she needed on one end, and got to the meat. She had never seen wire like that before. It's a great story in a book called, "The First Word," by Christine Keannelly.

They can seem that way. Mark Twain wrote a couple of stories about how bright they were, ( he was a keen observer of crows,).