Dept Of Transportation Cameras


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Dept Of Transportation Cameras

Dept Of Transportation Cameras

Crows are intelligent birds: people in various parts of the world have noticed that crows of diverse species are adept strategists that use trickery and circumstance to get food (see Amazing Crow Stories). Crows are sometimes raised by humans and kept as pets, a role in which they interact with their human keepers in ways that are both amusing and exasperating—but which also suggest considerable intelligence on the part of the bird. People have taught crows to mimic human speech, and at least one species, Corvus moneduloides, the New Caledonian Crow, has demonstrated a surprising ability to fashion simple tools that make foraging for food easier.

Captive Crows Make Tools

In experiments with New Caledonian Crows in captivity, researchers at the University of Oxford have shown that the birds are able to selectively identify a stick that can be used to move food from an inaccessible location to a more accessible one. The crows also make hooks out of straight wire for the same purpose. When materials are available, New Caledonian Crows make hooks from barbed vines and probes from twigs and pieces of leaves. Equipped with these tools, the crows fish insects and grubs out of cracks and crevices, and probe in soft organic material. These activities have been observed in the wild but, because the crows move about so much while foraging, it is difficult to document their feeding and tool use activities.

Attaching Cameras to Crows

Until recently, the best documented evidence of crow tool use came from captive crows, but scientists have developed some new tools of their own: Christian Rutz, Lucas A. Bluff, Alex A. S. Weir, and Alex Kacelnik, researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, have attached tiny cameras to crow’s tail feathers and filmed the birds remotely, recording them selecting, making, and apparently saving tools for repeated use in the wild.