COLOMBO — Crows have long had a reputation as a nuisance and a pest, even though it’s widely recognized that they’re among the most intelligent of birds. In Sri Lanka, that reputation goes back some 2,000 years, to the Jataka morality tales from Buddhist tradition. One of the tales tells of a “greedy crow” that spies a half-covered plate of fish in a nobleman’s kitchen and tries to steal it, only to be caught, plucked and thrown out. The moral being, of course, that greed is bad. But if the modern-day crows of Sri Lanka are any indication, it would be safe to assume that the Jataka crow ended …

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