I posted a thread on crows in October...
Posted on 10/29/2018, 11:34:52 AM by ETL
Assemblage of different components into novel functional and maneuverable tools has, until now, only been observed in apes, and anthropologists regard early human compound tool manufacture as a significant step in brain evolution.
Children take several years before creating novel tools, probably because it requires anticipating properties of yet unseen objects.
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In the study, Dr. Kacelnik and colleagues presented eight wild-caught New Caledonian crows with a puzzle box they had never encountered before, containing a small food container behind a door that left a narrow gap along the bottom.
Initially, the scientists left some sufficiently long sticks scattered around, and all the birds rapidly picked one of them, inserted it through the front gap, and pushed the food to an opening on the side of the box. All eight birds did this without any difficulty.
In the next steps, the team left the food deep inside the box but provided only short pieces, too short to reach the food.
These short pieces could potentially be combined with each other, as some were hollow and others could fit inside them.
In one example, they gave the birds barrels and plungers of disassembled hypodermic syringes. Without any help or demonstration, four of the crows partially inserted one piece into another and used the resulting longer compound pole to reach and extract the food.
At the end of the five-step investigation, the researchers made the task more difficult by supplying even shorter combinable parts, and found that one bird particular bird, ‘Mango,’ was able to make compound tools out of three and even four parts.
“The finding is remarkable because the crows received no assistance or training in making these combinations, they figured it out by themselves,” said study co-lead author Dr. Auguste von Bayern, from the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology and University of Oxford.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
Our local crows can do reasonable clutch replacements, but the modern cars tax their skills.