crow
dr. dolittle | December 25, 2012Dr. Alex Taylor from The University of Auckland has demonstrated that New Caledonian crows have the ability to perform causal reasoning, which is the ability to infer that something you cannot see may be the cause of something. According to the article, this is the first study to experimentally demonstrate this ability in a species other than humans.
SourceScience Now
dr. dolittle | September 11, 2012You may recall a prior post in which I talked about how intelligent crows are. In fact, there was a special on PBS demonstrating their ability to solve problems and even recognize human faces (HIGHLY recommended if you haven't yet had a chance to see it):
Watch A Murder of Crows on PBS. See more from Nature.
In a more recent study, Dr. Marzluff and colleagues used brain scans to demonstrate that crows not only remember faces, but they can also remember how they were treated by various people. In the study, his team captured 12 wild American crows while wearing latex "captor" face masks. In…
edyong | August 6, 2009Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" has been confirmed in a wonderful experiment. In the classic tale, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher until it rises within reach of its beak. This is no mere fiction - rooks, close relatives of crows, have the brains to actually do this.
The aptly named Chris Bird, along with Nathan Emery, gave four captive rooks (Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe) a chance to reach a small worm floating in a cylinder of water, with nothing but a small pile of stones sitting on the side. All of them solved the task, and Cook and Fry…
grrlscientist | November 27, 2007tags: crow, kitten, unlikely friends, streaming video
This is a story that I've linked to before, but the video is new since then; it tells the story of a wild crow that befriended a motherless kitten, fed and protected it and now that the kitten (now more a cat than a kitten) has found a home with humans, the crow still is fast friends. [7:29]