Via Machines Like Us, I came across this video of a crow (named 007) solving an extremely difficult puzzle. According to this article:
Dr. Alex Taylor studies wild birds for 3 months at a time (he releases them to the wild after) and had shown 007 the puzzles individually before. This, however, is the first time the crow will see them arranged in this order and he needs to figure out in which order to solve them to be successful.
See how the crow does it.
I absolutely love crows. They’re smart, social, and have a family/society structure very similar to that of humans. There’s a whole documentary done by The Nature of Things about them done a few years ago.
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Shows/Shows/The+Nature+of+Things/2009-10/ID/1385855962/
Amazing. Crows are incredible birds.
I sometimes wonder, though, that these tasks are simply complex for a human value of complex. Maybe from a bird’s point of view, it’s not that complex at all.
Since Japanese crows started a war against Homo Sapiens and won I’ll never underestimate their intelligence again.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17453_5-diabolical-animals-that-out-witted-humans.html
Nr. 4 (the rest is worth reading too).
David Quammen writing in the early 2000’s or so for Outside magazine wrote a column about crows. Interesting and entertaining. It was published in the collection “Natural Acts”.
Someone has reproduced it to a blog, in scanning it, it looks to be complete. It’s been some years since I’ve read it.
http://matthewpliesreference.blogspot.com/2004/11/has-success-spoiled-crow-by-david.html
Corvids--crows, ravens, jays--are, according to my ornithologist friend, extremely smart. They also like to play.
A few years ago we had a lot of snow and ice on our barn roof. We witnessed a crow who lost its footing and slid down the roof. Then the crow returned to the peak and slid down again, apparently just for fun, about half a dozen times. It was humorous and amazing. When I asked my friend about it, she said, “Well, I’ve never seen a crow play otter on the river bank, but I’m not really surprised.”
Last year we hung up some fat balls (is that the right term?) for the birds, only for them to have vanished when I returned from work.
During the weekend I finally saw a crow flying past the window with one of the in it’s beak, followed by a second one. They settled down on a nearby lawn and shared their treat. When they returned for more I saw how they took the fat balls: They actually untied the knot of the strings I had tied them up with!
This clip was part of a recent three episode BBC2 series The Animal Mind. Unfortunately, it is no longer on iPlayer but is on Usenet and YouTube.