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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.'"
That's pretty neat, we have a lot of crows where I work and I've observed ravens at campgrounds which are very well practiced in employing ingenious methods of
WHAT! WAIT!
14 gram video camera? 70 minutes of video footage? Whoa! What's the real news for nerds story here? Damn, I need one of those cameras!!! (c= I've been fiddling with converting these webcams for astro imaging I wonder what I could take from the top of (or bottom of) a kite or one of those tiny helicopters. W0000t
Crows, yeah, very clever birds. Probably could learn a lot from them... wow, neat camera...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Crows Gone Wild video.
Dog is my co-pilot.
The wireless cameras weigh just 14 grammes and can be worn by the crows without disturbing their natural behavior.
It doesn't disturb them? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen crow?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
...to get this damn camera unstuck from my tail?!?
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I for one, welcome our tool-using crow overlords.
but this isnt the first time we've known they use tools. check this out http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7329182515885554944 [clever crows]
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Crows have been observed using tools before. A particularly interesting instance of this is when they drop nuts into crosswalks at intersections, wait until cars smash them, observe the pedestrians crossing the street (its safe to cross), and retrieve the nut's meat.
Birds are damn smart, like that talking parrot who just died.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=HmKO-QMyLc4
Dropping nuts on a busy road where cars function as nutcrackers..
So what they're saying is that these crows are smarter than some humans?
I kid, I kid!
I find it fascinating that there are species that we thought would be completely unable to grasp the idea of tool use doing just that. It goes to show just how little we really know about how brains work, and how big they need to be to handle complex concepts.
When the crows start making little axes, I'd start to worry, though.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I for one welcome our new tool using crow overlo a ds!
I think Crowbar Overloads have been with us longer than you think.
it always did have something to do with power!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now I'll have to wear a hat to the Home Despot...
rj
Sorry, but the great scientist Gary Larson documented this phenomenon years ago. See http://www.curiosities.com/sp/CD6044.asp?afID=goocd6044&img=L (Sorry, I couldn't find a better link)
Another great use of RC aircraft gear for other purposes... Battery looks to be a 2-cell Lithium Polymer, ~150mAh or so. I use LiPos on all my RC airplanes and helicopters, pretty much the only way to go for lightweight applications.
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.)
http://www.ongoing-tales.com/SERIALS/oldtime/FAIRYTALES/aesop8.html
crows and ravens are seen as an intelligent and trickster characters in many ancient cultures around the world, some notable examples of prominent intelligent and tricky crow mythology being from the pacific northwest of north america, and ancient scandinavia
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1326277
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Heckle & Jeckle
I thought the camera added 20 pounds. I guess black really is slimming.
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. :)
Birds using twigs for complicated purposes?
That's unheard of!
You can't take the sky from me...
I should probably check before I shoot the loud ones in my neibhorhood. Make sure they dont have any tools. Those bastards are in season right now in my city. Every spring/fall it is necessary to drop a couple, otherwise they just take over and squak for hours.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Did anyone else notice the Bird taking a dump at the very beginning of the clip???
Letter To Iran
Sorry, I had to ask.
/. readers' hearts: penguin video!
Semi-seriously, imagine the applications for this technology. Trained crows getting shots of places that only crows can go. Imagine video of Ballmer chair throwing events, and other clandestine Microsoft sporting events visible currently only to crows. We don't want that kind of footage locked down in Microsoft Windows Media formats. We want to be able to exchange our crow footage easily via the Internet Archive, so that we can incorporate our crow footage into community-based video projects, such as the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection, which uses Ogg Theora formats.
Soon, YouTube soon will be hosting crow video feed competitions. We don't want that precious footage locked down, either.
Which raises the next question, of course, and it is more near and dear to
Right, so the radio waves from the camera have mutated them into genius tool-using crows.
We (humans) have known about many species of birds that use tools for many varied and complex tasks. This story submission is about our (humans) new method for increased observation of birds, and some of the findings.
It's too bad some moderators (Zonk again?) have moderated posts like Meta-Observation of Humans down as offtopic. Now that is some truely bird-brained behavior worth of future study.
that the crows were using tools to try and pry the cameras off their asses.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
What sort of "tools" did they film? Nothing specific mentioned in the article.
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Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
A two minutes and 13 seconds YouTube video from VideoSift.
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Here's Sam the Seagull
Think of it, free wireless broadcasting miniature cameras with tracking capabilities. Free spy toys!
Just look around for crow feathers, they'll fall off long after the scientists lose the ability to track them.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Crows.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Great, Crows using tools! Now they have an even cheaper source of labor to outsource American jobs to.
Crows clearly have a basic understanding of caws and effect!
I like how this important scientific information came from a site which is also featuring an article about "hot stinky plant sex" - http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12739-ancient-plant-has-hot-stinky-sex.html
Praise His Noodliness. RAmen.
NewScientist published an article a while back about chimps in the Congo using spears to kill bushbabies. Thrusting the spears into hollow trees and checking the tips for blood.
Pretty interesting stuff.
That is fucking amazing...both the camera size and the crows being smart... I used to shoot them with a shotgun just to get them to STFU!!!!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
Didn't it used to be said that it was our use of tools that was one of the defining characteristics of humans (and chimpanzees)?
Now it seems like all sorts of animals use tools. Even the "bird brained". And that put-down rightly invokes the stupidity of birds, because they are stupid. So, I guess our tool using trick isn't so high falootin' after all. No better than birds, how sad.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I would mod you funny, but I'm in crippling pain just from reading it. Bloody hell.
I thought I was near-immune to puns now, but... agh.
Wait, are they entirely sure that what they attached to the bird was small cameras, not, perhaps, small black monoliths, just before the birds were first observed using tools? OK, OK, they were probably pretty sure they were cameras, but they weren't black and monolith shaped, were they? Just checking here.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
It's a trap!
I'm so embarrassed. I wish everybody else was dead. -Bender
It had to be at least a year ago, probably two, that I watched a TV program (Discovery Channel? don't remember) in which a crow was using a stick as a tool for poking into holes. I saw it very clearly on TV. So I do not see what is new about this.
8) ...reminds me of the crows that usurped the corn I was feeding to the squirrels in my backyard.
The crows, not only grabbed one kernel, but made sure to grab two...and tore into them on the nearest branch.
And they picked the best source...these crows hung around International Mineral Chemicals Company at the animal feed ingredient load-out. This was phosphate animal feed ingredient contaminated corn.
The crows here, had two foot wingspans...they pecked the dead birds of the corn in their bodies, after they succumbed to overeating.
My great uncle, took advantage of the fact of the close relation to the mina bird...and clipped a crow chick's tongue...which made the crow talk...and say curse words...
Don't you think...? Or don't you?
They're clearly organizing!
SIG: HUP
You people and your slight differences disgust me! - Prof. Farnsworth
They repeated the experiment in Canada, but they had to blur the crows' faces to comply with tougher privacy laws.
I thought you might have figured it out by now-
The article only barely hints at it, but those cameras
were actually built by and attached to by the crows themselves!
They are reportedly now building tiny lethal lasers to attach to their legs
I for one, bow... well, you get the point.
.
- aqk
F U
I took a class with Kacelnik (the professor in charge of this research group) back at Oxford and he showed us videos of these crows in the lab. In one of them there was a male and female in an enclosure. A nut was placed in a tube-like device so the crow would have to use a tool (the right sized twig) to push it through the tubes until in came out the other end.
What ended up happening was that the female got to work straight away, pushing the twig through the tiny hole to manipulate the nut through the bends, while the male just sat back and watched. Eventually, after much trouble, she managed to push it out the other side and the male just swooped in and took it away. All the girls in the class just nodded knowingly...
I wonder what kind of tools they are using when they bomb my car. When I was reporting about an attempt to map Redwood National Park with LIDAR, a flock of seagulls flew behind the Aero Commander plane that I was photographing. They were flying in a formation that looked like a giant bird: http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/06/10/birds.jpg I love showing that to people. I am so glad that I caught it on film. Unfortunately, I missed the best shot of all time. I was standing on the side of the road with a camera in my hand when some guy pulled up to a stop light and proceeded to smoke some weed through an apple.
on windoze
;-(
sorry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Birds don't urinate. All the liquid they need to expel is included in their guano.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The 1950s scientific community just called. They want their understanding of psittacine intelligence back.
As it says in the Constitution, Lenin is in my shower.
The family of Corvids (which includes crows) are pretty amazing ---
More info in the book "Bird Brains"
Its not the years, its the mileage
Nice try. Maybe you should consider posting on topics you know about. Anyone who's had even a passing interest in parrots knows that they're extremely smart. Behaviorally its been asserted (with lots of supporting evidence), that they're about as smart as a two year old at least. In addition to that if you look for work by Irene Pepperberge, you'll find that she's been able to get parrots to count, discriminate and vocalize between groups of objects (for example she'll put down three blue squares and four red triangles, and ask "how many squares" and the bird (Alex I believe in this case) would respond "Three"), and even the concept of zero (in the same example she'll ask "how many red squares" "None" the bird will respond. There are videos of this very experiment available on the net if you google around). (Actually info available here: http://www.primidi.com/2005/07/09.html)
My mother's African Grey for example, has her cage by the laundry room, which of course has a a washing machine / dryer in it. When my mom would go inside to load up the laundry the parrot would start calling for her, and so she would naturally respond "I'm in the laundry room or Mummy is doing laundry". She developed some vocalizations around this but nothing super distinct ("Mummy is garble garble, etc) partially due to her age (she was less than one year old at the time). Whats interesting is that the dryer has a very annoying buzzer thats loud and obnoxious when its cycle ends, and this used to totally freak out the parrot. So my mom would say "Its just the dryer!".
After awhile (say a few months), the parrot started to vocalize more, and one of her favorite things became "Mummy is in the dryer!". Whats even more interesting is that she combines other sounds with "in the dryer". Like "Chris Pronger is in the dryer" (my mom watches alot of hockey) "Hockey is in the dryer". This could be attributed to semi random "sound" mixing, except that when someone goes into the laundry room she will usually use that persons identifier "Daddy is in the dryer", "Stevie is in the dryer", etc. So while it would be ridiculous to say that she understood the actual words, for sure the sounds "Mummy" and "is in the" and "dryer" got put together in her head. The other thing she does is when people leaves, she calls out "good bye" (fairly standard), and more interestingly "He's coming back!". "She's coming back" depending on the person (for certain people she knows she gets the gender right).
However the research on Alex (cited above) has resulted in far more sophisticated behaviour.
-=g
Yes it is very necessary, 20minutes of their squaking in the morning, I gaurantee you would be outside with a shotgun.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis