Experiment Shows How Scary Smart Crows Can Be

Why should we be the only animals with our level of intelligence? Why should we not only be smart, but so very much smarter than all the other creatures in the world?

Well, maybe we should take a wee step away from our high horses, because there are some surprisingly smart animals out there, and we're not talking about dolphins.

We're talking crows.

Check out this crow that figured out to dump things into water to raise its level so it could retrieve the thing it couldn't reach otherwise. You know, just mastering the concept of water displacement, no big whoop.

I mean, that's incredibly clever, and not just for a bird, but yes, for a bird, too. If someone called you bird-brained, would you take it as a compliment?

Yeah, me neither. But crows might just change my thoughts on that.

So those humans definitely have no more excuses — surely if a bird can do it, they can do it, too.

In a 2002 University of Oxford experiment, a New Caledonian crow named Betty bent a piece of wire that allowed her to hook a piece of meat and retrieve it from a tube.

As if that wasn't amazing enough, years later wild crows were observed fashioning hooks of their own, which, after some further experimentation led to a major realization: they could design and build their own tools.

Betty and those other crows mastered hooks, but what else could they do? Well, how about solving a problem using a sequence of three tools?

Again, University of Oxford researchers discovered that crows can plan at least three steps ahead, using tools in the right sequence to achieve a goal.

That's something that no animal other than humans had previously been known to be capable of.

Yes, they could use tools. Yes, they could make tools. Yes, they could use tools in a sequence. But, could they make tools from multiple parts?

Again, that's something only humans and great apes have been known to be able to do, and something human children don't develop for several years.

Inside was a morsel of food. To reach the food, they had a few sticks to choose from, none of which was long enough on its own to do the job.

Four of the crows involved in the experiment figured out to combine the sticks to push the food out of the box. One, a crow named Mango, "was able to make compound tools out of three and even four parts," wrote the researchers in a statement.

"It is possible that they use some form of virtual simulation of the problem, as if different potential actions were played in their brains until they figure out a viable solution, and then do it," suggested Alex Kacelnik.

But whatever the case, it's still a great result. "The finding is remarkable because the crows received no assistance or training in making these combinations, they figured it out by themselves," said August von Bayern.

The findings were published in Scientific Reports.

h/t: University of Oxford