a crow

from the Science publication:

We report here an experiment inspired by the observation that a captive female spontaneously bent a piece of straight wire into a hook and successfully used it to lift a bucket containing food from a vertical pipe (Fig. 1A). This occurred on the fifth trial of an experiment in which the crows had to choose between a hooked and a straight wire and only after the hooked wire had been removed by the other subject (a male). [ed.: that is, he stole it!] The animals had prior experience with the apparatus, but their only previous experience with pliant material was 1 hour of free manipulation with flexible pipe-cleaners a year before this experiment, and they were notfamiliar with wire (6).

I've mentioned before that I came out of Animals in Translation feeling that birds are:

a) the smartest animals (smartest I know of, at any rate)
b) probably as smart as we are
c) possibly smarter than we are

No idea whether that's true.

But that's what I came out of the book feeling.


A bird's eye view of cognition
Shaping of hooks in New Caledonian Crows (pdf file)