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

Fascinating

[ackthpt]

"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.

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...

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:Fascinating

[Arthur Grumbine]

Imagine a cluster of these cameras, you could film an theatre adaptation of Beowulf.

Re:Fascinating

[GrumpySimon]

The reason for these cameras is to film the New Caledonian Crow. People are very interested in it, because it makes a number of fairly complex tools from twigs/plants to extract grubs from logs. This type of tool use is actually more impressive than what chimps can do, and appear to be showing some form of cumulative cultural evolution.

You can see some more info at the Auckland Crow Group webpage, and I wrote a blog post on some recently published work showing the crows successfully doing a meta-tool task (i.e. using a tool, to get a tool, to get food) here.

So, the whole point of this arse-cam, is so that we can watch them make tools, use them, and see what else they get up to.

Disclaimer: I work in the same lab with a number of the Auckland crow group and am very good friends with them.

Re:Fascinating

[Bios_Hakr]

I fly RC helis. Even the smaller ones can carry a 200-gram camera with no problem. I've put a small Sony CyberShot on mine and shot some video.

The big problem is vibration. Even is the bigger electrics there is still a lot of HF vibration. It's no so bad when you take shots of the flying field. It sucks when you are trying to spy on the co-eds next door...

Some people have had good luck putting a camera on a motor-assisted sailplane (a.k.a. hotliner) and sending it up 800-feet or so. You turn off the motor and slow the plane way down to get minimal vibration.

Search YouTube for "RC heli on-board video" or, even better, search for "hotliner".

Waiting for the inevitable

[Scareduck]

Crows Gone Wild video.

Re:Waiting for the inevitable

[Peyna]

There's some scat action in the current video already.

Re:Waiting for the inevitable

[kiddygrinder]

You. You are a wild crow tool.

Re:Waiting for the inevitable

[WormholeFiend]

There's some scat action in the current video already

That's because there's a misleading typo in the headline... it should read "Video of Wild Crow Stool..."

question

[User 956]

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?

Re:question

[wthanna]

would that be African or European?

Re:question

[User 956]

would that be African or European?

Huh? I-- I don't know that. Auuuuuuuugh!

Re:question

[Anonymous Coward]

would that be African or European? African or European? Do you mean Corvus ruficollis, C. monedula, C. frugilegus, C. cornix, C. corone, C. edithae, C. rhipidurus, C. corax, C. capensis, C. albus, C. crassirostris, or C. albicollis? And what about the crows like C. monedula, C. cornix, and C. corax that are both African and European?

Now which tool do I use...

[linuxwrangler]

...to get this damn camera unstuck from my tail?!?

Re:Now which tool do I use...

[ackthpt]

Coming up on the Crow News Network: Dumpster left open behind McDonalds

Yeah, once they discover TV it'll all be over for them, too.

obligitary

[NiceGeek]

I for one, welcome our tool-using crow overlords.

Re:obligitary

[The Anarchist Avenge]

Perhaps you meant to say "croverlords"?

clever crows

[wizardforce]

but this isnt the first time we've known they use tools. check this out http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7329182515885554944 [clever crows]

Old News

[Yold]

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.

Re:Old News

[FinchWorld]

Birds are damn smart, like that talking parrot who just died.

No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.

Re:Old News

[Al Al Cool J]

I hate crows. Whenever I see crows dropping nuts onto the street, I run in and steal the nuts. Then I wave my fists at the stupid crows, shout insults, and cackle hysterically. Ah, good times.

Re:Old News

[Adambomb]

THOU SHALT NOT DEFACE THE FJORDS.

Plus He got an award for Norway, largely because of the fiddly bits around the fjords

Re:Old News

[Yold]

BTW, crows, parrots, and woodpeckers all have enlarged cerebellar portions of the brain, which corresponds to high levels of visual acuity, being able to analyze visual input, and then solve abstract problems. Read more here: http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdbrain.html

Re:Old News

[OYAHHH]

I,

Have a couple of crows that raise a chick or two in my neighborhood each year. Around May/June they get real cranky as the chicks start leaving the nest and hanging around my backyard.

What is interesting is that the parents will land in a tree branch directly above me and then proceed to pluck twigs and drop them on me.

While a lot of people seem to really dislike crows, I personally am enthralled by their ability to grasp just exactly what sort of thing might make me leave the premises.

Re:Old News

[lgw]

Using the environment to solve problems counts as tool use. It doesn't count as tool making, which is a more limited category. Very few species will create a tool to solve a problem, going beyond just using what they find around. Heck, I've known people who aren't that bright.

Re:Old News

[UbuntuDupe]

Speaking of which...

Do you think crows debate if humans are intelligent?

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).

Re:Old News

[wandlerer]

I discovered ravens are very intelligent and very territorial one spring. The morning after a particularly violent windstorm I walked beneath some trees to get to the parking lot in my apartment complex. I failed to understand the distress calls of the crows circling above. I narrowly missed stepping on a nest that had been dislodged by the wind, with a baby bird in it. As I exited the cover of the trees all of the birds started circling me, and diving toward me to protect the nest.

Each day, a group of 5 ravens would sit on the roof of the apartment complex and at the sight of me leaving - either from the apartment or the car - they would take flight, circle and dive until I was inside. Most of this journey was on pavement, far from the trees.

I don't know how common it is to be attacked by ravens, but I am not embarrassed to admit that I was both freaked out and scared by this. To hear them before I left each morning, and see them take flight as soon as I was just outside the door made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It also didn't matter what time I got back from work, as they were there waiting for something/someone all day, and as soon as I was visible, they were at it again. The immediate solution was to to take an old stick and wave it above my head to limit them to 3 feet or more above my head during their attacks. I'm sure it seemed strange to the neighbors to see someone walking to/from the car waving a stick in the air the whole time.

As good an experiment it would have been to see how long the birds would remember, I had the opportunity to move less than 2 months later, and I didn't hesitate to jump at it. The funny thing is that before I left, the nest was empty - and as nobody else had a reason to walk that particular route through the trees, I believe the little bird went on to fly away safely. Why they were after me the whole time still baffles - and scares - me.

Re:Old News

[Reziac]

My sister's parrot is pretty creative with what little language he knows. If you call out for a person he knows, he will answer in that person's voice (then you have to go check if the person or the parrot answered you).

He is jealous of their dog. He calls the dog, "Jaz, come!", then tells him "Jaz, sit" and after the dog obligingly does so, the parrot yells "BAD DOG!"

Crows have devised a better way

[Anonymous Coward]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HmKO-QMyLc4

Dropping nuts on a busy road where cars function as nutcrackers..

Re:So...

[DragonWriter]

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.

I think its fascinating that people think that creatures generally need to "grasp the idea" of doing something to be able to do it.

Oh, great

[Deadstick]

Now I'll have to wear a hat to the Home Despot...

rj

Caught on camera years ago

[jerkychew]

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)

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.)

old news by 2,500 years:

[circletimessquare]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop's_Fables

http://www.ongoing-tales.com/SERIALS/oldtime/FAIRYTALES/aesop8.html

A THIRSTY Crow found a Pitcher with some water in it, but so little was there that, try as she might, she could not reach it with her beak, and it seemed as though she would die of thirst within sight of the remedy. At last she hit upon a clever plan. She began dropping pebbles into the Pitcher, and with each pebble the water rose a little higher until at last it reached the brim, and the knowing bird was enabled to quench her thirst.

Moral: Necessity is the mother of invention.

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

Meta-Observation of Humans

[Nymz]

FTA - "We attach the camera to the tail feathers so the lens pokes out under the belly," says Rutz.

We attach cameras to the tails of birds, to satellites traveling past Jupiter right now, to carseats for police officers on the job, to every convenience store entrance/exit/aisle/cash register, to street corners filled with cars and pedestrians, to tubes inserted into our own bodies for surgery and examinations. Is there anything we haven't attached a camera to and recorded?

14 grammes?!

[Al Al Cool J]

I thought the camera added 20 pounds. I guess black really is slimming.

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. :)

So are they in season?

[Tweekster]

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.

Re:So...

[UncleTogie]

A crow with an axe isn't that worrying. A crow with an AK-47 on other hand...

...but he's got B*d L*ght!

Holy Crap

[DumbSwede]

Did anyone else notice the Bird taking a dump at the very beginning of the clip???

Yeah, cool, but does it run on...

[christian.einfeldt]

Sorry, I had to ask.

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 /. readers' hearts: penguin video!

Re:Yeah, cool, but does it run on...

[Jeremi]

Maybe you should talk to a professional about your hate.

You mean like a hit man? I know Ballmer is annoying, but really -- isn't that taking it a bit far?

I can only assume...

[proxy318]

that the crows were using tools to try and pry the cameras off their asses.

A technophile's benefit of this research...

[FauxReal]

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.

Just what we needed

[edwardpickman]

Great, Crows using tools! Now they have an even cheaper source of labor to outsource American jobs to.

Re:I for one...

[quellen]

Crows clearly have a basic understanding of caws and effect!

Re:Fascinating -but it gets worse

[aqk]

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.