I am a great admirer of crows, ravens, all the corvids. A gaggle of them spy on me regularly from the eucalyptus trees in front of the house, commenting and reporting on my comings and goings in dark muttered croaks. Or they sit in the huge dead pine tree by the road watching me while I sit in my yellow summer chair and read books about . . . crows.
So it was with interest I read a story by Thomas Maugh II that appeared in the 8-8-09 L.A. Times: “Birds live up to fabled ingenuity.” Writes Mr. Maugh, “In ‘The Crow and the Pitcher,’ Aesop wrote of a thirsty bird confronted with a half-full pitcher of water. When the bird discovered that the water level was too low to reach, he dropped stones in to raise the level until it was high enough to quench his thirst.
“Aptly named zoologist Christopher David Bird of University of Cambridge showed that rooks, members of the crow family, could perform the same task, dropping stones into a tall glass beaker to retrieve a floating wax worm.
"The results, reported this week in the journal Current Biology, are not totally unexpected: Crows have previously been shown to use leaves and sticks as probes to dig out grubs, and shells and rocks as hammers to break open prey or as plugs to form pools of water for drinking.”
Continues Maugh, “The birds appeared to calculate how high the water had to rise, and put in only enough stones to raise the water to that level, not stopping to try to reach the worm after each stone. They also figured out quickly that larger stones would raise the water more quickly.
“The only other animals known to have accomplished a similar feat are orangutans . . . but the rooks’ feat is more impressive . . . because their brains are much smaller than those of orangutans.”
Volumetric smarty pants in elegant black plumage. Who keep a sharp eye on what humans are up to. We have been warned.
So it was with interest I read a story by Thomas Maugh II that appeared in the 8-8-09 L.A. Times: “Birds live up to fabled ingenuity.” Writes Mr. Maugh, “In ‘The Crow and the Pitcher,’ Aesop wrote of a thirsty bird confronted with a half-full pitcher of water. When the bird discovered that the water level was too low to reach, he dropped stones in to raise the level until it was high enough to quench his thirst.
“Aptly named zoologist Christopher David Bird of University of Cambridge showed that rooks, members of the crow family, could perform the same task, dropping stones into a tall glass beaker to retrieve a floating wax worm.
"The results, reported this week in the journal Current Biology, are not totally unexpected: Crows have previously been shown to use leaves and sticks as probes to dig out grubs, and shells and rocks as hammers to break open prey or as plugs to form pools of water for drinking.”
Continues Maugh, “The birds appeared to calculate how high the water had to rise, and put in only enough stones to raise the water to that level, not stopping to try to reach the worm after each stone. They also figured out quickly that larger stones would raise the water more quickly.
“The only other animals known to have accomplished a similar feat are orangutans . . . but the rooks’ feat is more impressive . . . because their brains are much smaller than those of orangutans.”
Volumetric smarty pants in elegant black plumage. Who keep a sharp eye on what humans are up to. We have been warned.
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