Let's crow old together...

It's no secret, these murderous jet black winged enigmas are fiercely intelligent. So much so that evidence of their zoological cognitive feats beg repudiation of the negative "bird brain" colloquialism. There are two phenomenon in particular that prove that crows have something going for them in the evolutionary gene pool:

1) This first one is illustrative of crows' impressive ability to adapt to an urban environment that has been exponentially constructed around them. Whereas other less adaptable birds would migrate or change food sources to survive, crows dig in their awkward lil' heels and make do with what they've got:



2) One defining characteristic of an intelligent animal is if they can use tools to their advantage in the wild to solve novel problems. Crows? Check. Specifically, New Caledonian Crows create hooked probes from twigs in order to obtain food. They have developed this behavior over thousands of years of rich crow stick-bending tradition and evolution, therefore the story of a crow named Betty is all the more intriguing.

Betty was caught as a child and put in captivity with Abel, a male who spent the last 10 years in a zoo. A small bucket of pig heart (crow's fave) was placed in a pipe and the crows were presented with a straight wire and one already bent into a hook. Abel, being the opportunistic male that isolation has turned him into, grabbed the hook and took off, leaving Betty to her own devises. So, she strategically bent the straight wire into a hook using her beak and feet in order to get to the food. This is the first time an animal had been observed making a hook out of unnatural material to solve a novel problem. Get it girl! To make sure this wasn't a fluke, Betty was tested with Abel again, this time with just a straight wire to go on. 9 out of 10 times, Abel laid back while Betty turned it out by fabricating a hook and obtaining the grub.

Now, it's real sweet because..."The researchers say that Betty's creation of hooks cannot be attributed to the shaping or reinforcement of randsomly generated behavior. And since she had no other crows to model, no training with pliant objects, and very limited prior experience with wire, they see her actions as novel and purposeful. " So even though she has probably seen and taken part in past behavior that involved creating hooks in the wild, Betty had to adapt those experiences to solve a completely new problem, something pretty 'heady' for a lil' bird brain. I mean scientists are saying that Crows may even surpass Chimps in their ability to use tools to their advantage.

"This is how they do it" (this is how they do it):



How it gets done in the wild (note the meticulous selection of twigs and leaves needed to engineer the hook):