I'm reading an excellent book right now called In the Company of Crows and Ravens (review pending) and found a couple of uncanny videos illustrative of their capacity for ingenuity. The first involves modified tool use and the second, from Attenborough's Life of Birds, shows how crows can use human landscapes to their advantage.
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You don't have to be particularly intelligent to use tools - many animals do so, including some insects. But it takes a uniquely intelligent animal to be able to combine different tools to solve a problem. We can do it, the great apes can do it, and now the New Caledonian crow joins our exclusive…
tags: birds, ornithology, Common Raven, Northern Raven, Corvus corax, animal behavior, animal culture, aggression, dominance hierarchy, social groups, social conflict, post-conflict behavior, consolation, empathy, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Common Raven, Corvus…
Crows are smart. Anyone who watches them for a while can figure this out.
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There are 19 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with…
i love crows. they are so intelligent and have such attitude. i've seen the attenborough video before, but not the first. thanks.
and of course, i love every opportunity to brag about my "pet" crow, tom servo. tom servo is a wild fish crow who has been coming to my house every breeding season for years. he has a leg band (i've already gotten the number and reported a sighting) and is tame enough that i can remain outside within about five feet of the feeding station and he will come and collect his food (he eats cat food and prefers the kind with the filling in the middles). he disappears after his chicks fledge and reappears the next spring. he is tame enough that if there is no food out there he will caw at the house (sometimes actually on our back porch if there's a handy perch) until he sees someone. then he glares in the windows at us until we bring out the food. he has us trained well :). i wish i knew what his story was (i sent email to the original bander, but got no reply). here's a picture of my favorite crow.
i've already put the book you mentioned on my wish list, but i look forward to your review.
knobody:
Whereabouts do you live? I know a bander of crows.
cpp: gainesville, fl. according to the certificate i got from reporting his band number, tom servo was banded by a Dr. Michael Avery who apparently works for the USDA APHIS group. if you know him, ask him why he never replied to my email last year :).