Rooks Use Reasoning Power to Get the Worm!

"Bird brain," heh? That may be a compliment to some humans! Watch the videos in this article and judge for yourselves. These are some very clever corvids. I don't know what the scientists call it, but to me this demonstrates problem solving that involves thinking and reasoning skills that some humans still do not possess today! Well, the rook is a Goddess-affiliated bird :) (Image: Siren eimi, from vase painting) From BBC News Clever rooks repeat ancient fable Thursday, 6 August 2009 By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC News One of Aesop's fables may have been based on fact, scientists report. In the tale, written more than 2,000 years ago, a crow uses stones to raise the water level in a pitcher so it can reach the liquid to quench its thirst. Now a study published in Current Biology reveals that rooks, a relative of crows, do just the same when presented with a similar situation. The team says the study shows rooks are innovative tool-users, even though they do not use tools in the wild. Another paper, published in the journal Plos One, shows that New Caledonian crows - which like rooks, are a member of the corvid group, along with ravens, jackdaws, magpies and jays - can use three tools in succession to reach a treat. Floating feast The crow and the pitcher fable was used by Aesop to illustrate that necessity is the mother of invention. But until now, the morality tale was not thought to have a grounding in fact. To investigate further, a team from the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) presented four captive rooks with a set-up analogous to the fable. The birds were shown a clear tube containing a small amount of water. Floating upon it was an out-of-reach worm. And a pile of stones were positioned nearby. Dr Nathan Emery, co-author of the paper, from QMUL, said: "The rooks have to put multiple stones in the tube until the worm floats to the top." And the four birds did just that. Two, called Cook and Fry, raised the water-level enough to grab the floating feast the very first time that they were presented with the test, while Connelly and Monroe were successful on their second attempt. Footage of the experiments shows the rooks first assessing the water level by peering at the tube from above and from the side, before picking up and dropping the stones into the water. The birds were extremely accurate, using the exact number of stones needed to raise the worm to a height where they could reach it. In another experiment, the rooks were presented with a similar scenario. This time they were given a combination of small and large stones. Overall, Dr Emery told BBC News, the rooks opted for the larger ones, raising the worm to the top of the tube more quickly. He said: "They are being as efficient as possible." And when given a choice between a tube filled with water and another filled with sawdust, the birds were more likely to opt for the liquid-filled tube. The researchers say their findings suggest that Aesop's ancient fable may have been based on fact. They said: "In folklore, it is rarely possible to know with certainty which corvid is being referred to. "Hence, Aesop's crow might have easily been Aesop's rook." 'No surprise' Earlier this year, the same team revealed that rooks were able to use different tools to solve a variety of complex problems. Rest of article.

Study Shows Crows Recognize Faces

Well - I could have told them that if they'd asked! After feeding families of crows here for nearly 20 years, I can tell you that not only do they recognize the place (house/yard), they also recognize me as opposed to my sister, Darlene, who looks very like me. They also distinguish me from Don, which is much easier - he's the skinny one with white hair! From The New York Times Friend or Foe? Crows Never Forget a Face, It Seems By MICHELLE NIJHUIS Published: August 25, 2008 Crows and their relatives — among them ravens, magpies and jays — are renowned for their intelligence and for their ability to flourish in human-dominated landscapes. That ability may have to do with cross-species social skills. In the Seattle area, where rapid suburban growth has attracted a thriving crow population, researchers have found that the birds can recognize individual human faces. John M. Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, has studied crows and ravens for more than 20 years and has long wondered if the birds could identify individual researchers. Previously trapped birds seemed more wary of particular scientists, and often were harder to catch. “I thought, ‘Well, it’s an annoyance, but it’s not really hampering our work,’ ” Dr. Marzluff said. “But then I thought we should test it directly.” To test the birds’ recognition of faces separately from that of clothing, gait and other individual human characteristics, Dr. Marzluff and two students wore rubber masks. He designated a caveman mask as “dangerous” and, in a deliberate gesture of civic generosity, a Dick Cheney mask as “neutral.” Researchers in the dangerous mask then trapped and banded seven crows on the university’s campus in Seattle. In the months that followed, the researchers and volunteers donned the masks on campus, this time walking prescribed routes and not bothering crows. The crows had not forgotten. They scolded people in the dangerous mask significantly more than they did before they were trapped, even when the mask was disguised with a hat or worn upside down. The neutral mask provoked little reaction. The effect has not only persisted, but also multiplied over the past two years. Wearing the dangerous mask on one recent walk through campus, Dr. Marzluff said, he was scolded by 47 of the 53 crows he encountered, many more than had experienced or witnessed the initial trapping. The researchers hypothesize that crows learn to recognize threatening humans from both parents and others in their flock. After their experiments on campus, Dr. Marzluff and his students tested the effect with more realistic masks. Using a half-dozen students as models, they enlisted a professional mask maker, then wore the new masks while trapping crows at several sites in and around Seattle. The researchers then gave a mix of neutral and dangerous masks to volunteer observers who, unaware of the masks’ histories, wore them at the trapping sites and recorded the crows’ responses. The reaction to one of the dangerous masks was “quite spectacular,” said one volunteer, Bill Pochmerski, a retired telephone company manager who lives near Snohomish, Wash. “The birds were really raucous, screaming persistently,” he said, “and it was clear they weren’t upset about something in general. They were upset with me.” Again, crows were significantly more likely to scold observers who wore a dangerous mask, and when confronted simultaneously by observers in dangerous and neutral masks, the birds almost unerringly chose to persecute the dangerous face. In downtown Seattle, where most passersby ignore crows, angry birds nearly touched their human foes. In rural areas, where crows are more likely to be viewed as noisy “flying rats” and shot, the birds expressed their displeasure from a distance. Though Dr. Marzluff’s is the first formal study of human face recognition in wild birds, his preliminary findings confirm the suspicions of many other researchers who have observed similar abilities in crows, ravens, gulls and other species. The pioneering animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz was so convinced of the perceptive capacities of crows and their relatives that he wore a devil costume when handling jackdaws. Stacia Backensto, a master’s student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who studies ravens in the oil fields on Alaska’s North Slope, has assembled an elaborate costume — including a fake beard and a potbelly made of pillows — because she believes her face and body are familiar to previously captured birds. Kevin J. McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology who has trapped and banded crows in upstate New York for 20 years, said he was regularly followed by birds who have benefited from his handouts of peanuts — and harassed by others he has trapped in the past. Why crows and similar species are so closely attuned to humans is a matter of debate. Bernd Heinrich, a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont known for his books on raven behavior, suggested that crows’ apparent ability to distinguish among human faces is a “byproduct of their acuity,” an outgrowth of their unusually keen ability to recognize one another, even after many months of separation. Dr. McGowan and Dr. Marzluff believe that this ability gives crows and their brethren an evolutionary edge. “If you can learn who to avoid and who to seek out, that’s a lot easier than continually getting hurt,” Dr. Marzluff said. “I think it allows these animals to survive with us — and take advantage of us — in a much safer, more effective way.”

Crows are Smart - Well, Duh!

Why are people continually surprised when new research reveals that the creations of Mother Nature aren't as stupid as humankind? Excerpted from a Newsweek online article: Think Apes are Smart? Meet Mr. Crow By Sharon Begley Thursday, August 16, 2007 10:48 AM ... Scientists are reporting today that New Caledonian crows are no slouches when it comes to sophisticated tool use. As they report online in the journal Current Biology, the crows can spontaneously combine two tools to get a snack--and in a way that suggests they solved the problem not by trial and error, but by reasoning through analogy. That is, the crows were able to see that a novel situation was essentially the same as one they'd encountered before. "Evidence suggests that, from the earliest human stone tools, analogical reasoning has been at the core of human innovation," Russell Gray of the University of Auckland, who led the study, said in a statement. "This hallmark of human intelligence may also be at work in both the great apes and New Caledonian crows." In the study, the researchers put food in a hole that was unreachable unaided. They also left a stick lying around, but it was also too short to reach the food. They left one more prop: a long stick in a "toolbox." This stick was long enough to reach the food--but it, too, was out of reach. No problem. The crows used the short stick to get the long tool out of the box, then used the long stick to get the food. In fact, six out of seven crows immediately tried to get the long stick with the short stick; only one dunce did the bird-brained thing of trying to get the food directly with the short stick and realizing that wouldn't work, and that he had to use the short stick to get the long stick. Next challenge: food still at the bottom of a deep hole, small stick inside the toolbox and long stick within the crows' reach. The crows briefly used the long stick to poke the toolbox, but immediately saw their mistake and then just carried the long stick directly to the hole to fish out the food. They did not brainlessly apply the rule, "use available stick to acquire hidden stick and then proceed to food hole," but instead scoped out the situation and employed the most efficient algorithm for getting their snack--in this case, "forget about out-of-reach short stick, and notice instead that available long stick is all I need to fetch food." It's fascinating to think about the evolution of intelligence, and perhaps a measure of our collective ego that we fancy only we have it, with our direct ancestors and perhaps a few cousins having pale shadows of it. Clearly, as the continuing research on animal intelligence shows, that is not the case. ****************************************************************************** Evolution? Yeah, right. Well, when I was a child, I believed in fairy tales too :) I wonder, is this reasoning ability restricted only to Caledonian crows? Or is it an attribute of crows in general? If I stick a tool box out in my yard, dig a hole and put some treats down into it that my run-of-the-mill Wisconsin crows can only get at by using the tools in the box (I'll make it easy and leave the box open for them), will they be able to figure it out? Hmmm, I think I'll try it. I've been meaning to do some transplanting and I'll have to dig a hole in order to move this particular shrub - By the way, this article got me to checking out some of my old research, which led me to other things and other things, and lo and behold, I'm right in the middle of a full-blown research project which ties Athena, crows, serpents and possibly even the god of medicine to the checkerboard pattern which, as we know, is used in western chess. Of course, the use of the two-colored checkerboard is a WHOLE nother topic! Oh my, a woman's work is never done.