[BRIEF NOTE] On the intelligent crow

[rfmcdonald]

The crow turns out to be scarily intelligent.

In a series of tests, the four rooks named Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe were offered a tempting treat - a juicy worm floating on the surface of water in a vertical tube.

To start with, the worm was out of reach. Videos of the experiments show the birds examining the tube from different angles, appearing to think the problem through.

Then the researchers provide a solution in the form of a handful of pebbles. The rooks can be seen picking up the stones and dropping them into the tube to raise the water level and bring the worm within reach.

Cook and Fry succeeded straight away, while Connelly and Monroe took two attempts.

The birds appeared to estimate how many pebbles were needed from the outset. Rather than try for the worm after each stone was dropped, they waited until the time seemed right.

They also selected larger stones over smaller ones, for greater effect.

In other experiments, the rooks quickly understood that sawdust cannot be displaced in the same way as water.

There's this news item, too.

Experiments by researchers at Oxford University show that New Caledonian crows in captivity spontaneously used up to three tools in the correct sequence to achieve a goal - a feat never before seen in non-human animals without explicit training.

Five out of seven birds tested figured out how to extract different lengths of sticks from tubes so they could ultimately get one long enough to fish out a morsel of food at the bottom of the deepest tube.

In all, the crows needed three sticks of different lengths to achieve their objective of reaching the food - and four of the five successful birds came up with the sequence needed on the first try.

[. . . U]sing tools to make or retrieve other tools has long been considered a hallmark of human intelligence, and has often been interpreted as evidence of advanced cognitive abilities, such as planning and analogical reasoning.

While the researchers concluded that the crows did not probe for sticks merely at random, they could find no evidence that their sequential tool use was a mark of reasoning or human-like planning.

"It seems that there might be something about this family of birds that is a little bit more similar to our own problem-solving abilities," acknowledged Wimpenny. "But obviously much more needs to be done in terms of experiments."

"So it's hard to make truly comparative conclusions on this now."

Oh, and there's at least one anecdotal report claiming that whole communities can pick up grudges against individuals. And apparently crows have the equivalents of neocortexes and exhibit encephalization quotients just behind those of primates. And also, apparently crows (and parrots) are as smart relative to other birds as great apes are to other primates (for the record) besides having brain structures comparable to those of bright mammals.

Are those black cawing birds we see picking through our garbage some kind of individual?