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

[usuakari.livejournal.com]

Ho there. :) Found your journal on the reccomendation of sealwhiskers when we were discussing artists, and I've been lurking for a week or two.

Thought you might find this interesting as well. It's an article about a parrot that's learning to surf the web. Both stories are really interesting, and I remember David Attenborough getting very excited about the intelligence and adaptability of crows when he wa doing The Secret Life of Birds which covers some similar territory as well.

crows using tools

[luckyavatar.livejournal.com]

A few years ago we thought we had a problem with neighborhood dogs getting into the trash, as it turns out it was the crows. One neighbor had bungee cords tied to the top of the trash cans to keep the dogs out, one day we saw a pair of crows working together to carefully untie the bungee cords and knock the lid off of the trash can, they then rummaged through the trash to get what they wanted.
Crows are very smart!

[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. :)

Re: crows using tools

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Wow! That is amazing! Who would have thought they were strong enough to remove bungee cords, but more extraordinary than that: cooperation in such a difficult task!!!! Brilliant!

Crows are wonderful. I've watched them playing.

Where I live we have some very smart members of the crow family -- butcher birds. They display their intelligence in a number ways; the most impressive is their complex and variable, warbling song and other vocalisations. Another is their speedy learning ability. They are very friendly. Yesterday I was standing on my balcony talking on my cordless phone and a butcher bird flew down and landed on the railing easily within arm's reach watching me inquisitively. This was a wild bird! The are incredibly curious.