Great, another animal that's better at making friends than I am.
It's pretty obvious if you just look at them. For example, I listen to the caws that crows make and they have different sounds for when they find food or when there's a predator or when they're just saying "I'm here". The other day I saw a few crows jumping around in a tree cawing and making lots of noise and it's just obvious that they're having fun and that they know each other.
An important point of the research done here is that the "friends" were not kin-relations. In our daily observations, can we exclude that some birds we observe being helpful to each other are not kin? In this study they apparently did that, and over 20 years (40 breeding seasons).
Why does kinship matter? Well, apparently there are some good scientific theories explaining the evolutionary benefit of altruism among kins. But altruism among non-kins (i.e. friendship) was still an open question, hence this study.
Interesting point i didn't think about that
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