crows making tools

[miriam_e]

I meant to post this a while back, but forgot to.

Some months back Betty the New Caledonian crow caused a stir when she demonstrated extraordinary tool-making intelligence. She spontaneously created a hook out of wire in order to get some food. Go to http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/tools_main.html to read more about this and look at the short (1.2Mb) video there showing her actually doing it. At first she tries to get at the food using a straight piece of wire, and at one point almost manages to, but she soon realises this won't work and bends the end of the wire into a hook to lift the food container up.

Comments

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Wow! I missed that article. Thanks.
New Scientist is the only newspaper I read. All the other "normal" newspapers work far too hard to instill feelings of doom and fear into their readers and their unbalanced reporting favors sport over far more relevant science and technology. I also missed a lot of The Secret Life of Birds when it was screened here. Darn! I like to catch all David Attenborough's documentaries -- his story researchers are brilliant.

I went to a talk given by Irene Pepperberg when she visited Australia a while back. Her work is truly inspirational. She and a lot of modern animal watchers are helping us understand our place in the world.

The thing I love about LiveJournal is the way it facilitates networks of similarly interested people. I am delighted to have met you. :)