Crows can remember human faces for years.

In addition to being able to solve puzzles and use tools, crows — whose exceptional intelligence continues to pleasantly surprise researchers — can also remember human faces for years. Depending on how they’re treated, this can be either a good thing or a bad thing for the human in question. Crows have been shown to remember people who are kind to them, bringing small trinkets and other gifts back to the human to show their appreciation, but they also hold grudges against those who’ve crossed them, sometimes going so far as to attack them for years after a slight (whether real or perceived).

They’re able to do all this courtesy of the nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), a region of their brain that’s essentially the avian equivalent of a mammal’s prefrontal cortex. Maybe it’s time we rethink “bird brain” as an insult.