These Crows Are Smarter Than Non-Human Apes When It Is Comes To Building Compound Tools

Let's say there is a $ 100 note behind a bookshelf just beyond your reach, and besides the shelf is a set of TinkerToys. Even toddler could probably snap together a few of the sticks to fish the bill out.

But what about an animal? One especially smart crow species seems to have figured out this problem on its own.

New Caledonian crows are heavy hitters when it comes to smarts, known for their play and advanced toolmaking skills. Aimed at new paper shows the birds demonstrating toolmaking behavior in the past.

"Auguste von Bayern from the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology and the University." of Oxford told Gizmodo. "It's really testing their creative ability."

New caledonian crows. First, they presented with a transparent box containing food on a track, which, if pushed to the end, would come out of the box. They also supplied wooden dowels long enough to reach the food and push it along the track. This familiarized the crows with the task.

Then, the product of the world of the world and the world of the world.

Four of the birds (named Tumult, Taboo, Mango and Jungle).

Mango, "a bird with apparently fluctuating motivation", refused to participate in the followups according to the published study Scientific Reports.

The other four continued to be popular with the food and were disqualified.

The researchers continued to question the subject of these two types of tests, but when the food was out of reach of a two-component tool, only Mango knew what to do: He made three- and four-part tools. It turns out that he was motivated enough to outperform his peers. The findings presented here "matches and exceeds this evidence for this ability in non-human primates," the authors write.

This is a small study, of course, and does not observe the birds in the wild (though New Caledonian crows are well-known tool users, fashioning hooks to feed). But it's still "truly amazing" that the birds figured out the relatively complex task out.

"It is not surprising that chimpanzees can do similar stuff to human children," said von Bayern, "but to find such similar feats in remote relative matters that they've developed their cognitive independently."

The researchers are highly interested in how to understand the evolution and how to improve the impact of cognitive ability evolves.

Who knows what the birds will learn to build next? Especially Mango. Watch out for him.