Smart Crows

We all know crows are smart, but this is nevertheless impressive tool-making.

It’s footage from a problem-solving experiment conducted at Oxford University. Here’s a brittanica.com description of the experiment:

a small bucket of food was placed inside a tube; the crow was unable to reach the bucket because of the length of the tube. She then picked up a short length of wire, and, after a few futile attempts to snag the bucket with it, bent the wire into a hook and lifted the bucket from the tube. What’s more, the crow repeated the behavior in nine out of 10 subsequent trials.

~ by lolarusa on July 9, 2009.