Dr Doolittle on corvids would be easy.
1. Train crows to push a touchscreen for reward of food.
2. Next set up two touchscreens back to back. Make it so touching one screen only dispenses food on the other side.
3. Next make it so food is dispensed on the other side only one crow is perched at each terminal.
4. Next make it so food is only dispensed after a crow says something to the other crow on the other side.
5. Next display a picture on one terminal and give the other crow the choice of four quadrants. The food is dispensed if the picture on the far side matches the displayed picture.
6. Start decoding words.
Not exactly your protocol, but I'm reminded of https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-taught-...
This could be done cheaply with some rooted Kindle Fire tablets. I don't follow 100% but it sounds cool.
Hey, that makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of crows who come to the bird feeder in my backyard. I would just have to figure out how to easily make a food dispenser, and what sort of touch screen a crow can activate....
I would do it myself but where I am there are almost no corvids, they (and city pigeons) are basically displaced by the highly aggressive local bird. Which seems to swarm around from time to time but doesn't stay anywhere permanent locally except for grocery store parking lots. That's probably enough to leak location info on this anon account so I'll shut up now