Video of Wild Crow Tool Use Caught With Tail Cams

willatnewscientist writes "Scientists from the University of Oxford have recorded New Caledonian crows using tools in the wild for first time. The footage was captured by attaching tiny cameras to their tail feathers. The wireless cameras weigh just 14 grammes and can be worn by the crows without disturbing their natural behavior. The trick has provided the first direct evidence of the birds' using tools in the wild and may represent an important development in animal behavior studies. 'The camera also contains a simple radio transmitter that reveals the crows' location. This lets the researchers track them at a distance of few hundred metres, so that they can catch the camera's video signal with a portable receiving dish. Up to 70 minutes of footage can be broadcast by the camera's chip, and the camera is shed once the bird moults its tail feathers.'"

Comments

Even smarter crow video here

[dstone]

Bashing away with a stick is one thing.

But having limited success with a tool and then modifying the same tool to suit the problem at hand is an even more impressive display of intelligence, I think...

http://youtube.com/watch?v=03ykewnc0oE (Crow fails to grab something with straight wire, so it bends it into a hook.)

Crows' Response To Surveillance?

[aldheorte]

In the book the "In the Company of Crows and Ravens", crows on the researchers' campus could distinguish two researchers out of thousands of people and would continually harangue them whenever they were seen as they were rather displeased at previously being captured and manhandled. I wonder how these crows are responding to surveillance and the ability of the human researchers to track them wherever they go? Are any of them self aware enough to know that the device is associated with humans and remove it? What can we learn from them about operating in a society where people are increasingly under constant surveillance? A paranoid might say that its their tail feathers now, but your equivalent is on the line next. :)

Re:Fascinating

[mikael]

There was a guy in Germany, who made a Cat Cam - basically a keyring camera combined with a microcontroller to provide high-resolution timelapse images. Look at the Mr Lee Cat cam for some stories.

Re:Old News

[Rei]

I'll second that about parrots. By the first year and a half of life, my yellow-headed amazon has:

* Learned to take apart wooden clothespins in consistently under 30 seconds.
* Undo the clasps on my shirt, likewise quickly
* Remove my earrings, often before I can stop him.
* Take apart metal kitchen magnets -- the ones with the tough-to-open spring clip on them. We gave him one the first time because we figured he couldn't damage it; we didn't see a way. Instead, he figured out that the pin mechanism was removable, pulled the pin out, opened it up, took out the spring, etc. We gave him a pack of them for fun, and he got taking them apart down to under 30 seconds.
* Outsmarting me on treat ball placement. At under six months old, we were trying to convince him to stand on his "cladder" -- a toy of shifting wooden squares that he hates. We hung it next to his "boing", which he loves, and then hung a treat ball on a thin rope (too thin for him to climb on) past the cladder, so he'd have to step on the cladder to get the treats. All of them hung from a common heavy diagonal support cord. It kept appearing like my partner was making the problem easier for him; I kept finding the treat ball wrapped around the cladder, propped next to the boing, and the treats eaten. I eventually caught Mal (my parrot) in the act: he climbed the support rope up to the treat ball's rope, grabbed onto it with his beak, then climbed down the support rope while holding onto it. Then, back at the boing, he wrapped it around the edge of the cladder so it'd stay in place and he could eat at his leisure. How old of a human child do you think it'd take to solve something like that? I'd guess somewhere between two and four years, no?
* Recognizes self in mirror (never treats it like another bird; always casual around mirrors. If he reacts at all, it's just to preen).

One thing I *haven't* observed, however, is tool use. We'll see if he ever picks it up. I've never really put him in a situation where he'd need to use tools. I've only read of one case of parrots using tools (one was documented as using one of its feathers to help preen itself). Corvines (crows and ravens) seem much more into tool use.

Linguistically, while they're "capable", they're still orders of magnitude behind humans. Even still, he doesn't fail to impress me. He calls us by name -- for example, if he's with one person, he calls for the other, or if someone starts cooking in the kitchen, he calls for them, 9 times out of 10). He's potty trained, in the respect that if we ask him to go, and he hasn't gone recently, he will; however, he won't always tell us when he needs to go or head off on his own, so if we forget to offer it to him and wait too long, he'll go where he is. He puts together *very* rudimentary sentences; the only prefix he knows to use is "I want". He learned it with "I want up" (in comparison to our command for him, "Up"), but he tags it onto other things he hears us say. For example, we often say things like "breakfast ready" or "breakfast soon" when we're fixing it (we speak with a simplified language around him), and he's started saying "I want breakfast" when he sees us in the kitchen in the morning. It's funny how he also applies things to his own situations. For example, he'll sometimes say "I go upstairs" when he climbs the little ladder on top of his playtop (we say it when we go up the living room stairs). He also has invented a tradition of "kissing" before meals. Rather than go straight for our food (which we always share with him), he'll walk over to us on the back of the couch and say, "Kiss!" and kiss us several times before going down to eat. I'm not sure why he came up with that (we never made him kiss before meals), but it sure is cute ;) Of his whole vocabulary of 50-100 words and phrases (somewhere in that range), the only "nonsensical" or "random" thing he says (excepting the typical amazon "happy talk" before he goes to bed) is "apple". It has no correlation with wanting an apple or anything like that. He probably picked it up because he inserts it at random times when it's amusing, causing us to laugh and pay attention to him (i.e., positive reinforcement).