Rooks can’t bend spoons with their minds just yet, but they did bend wires using their beaks to hook food in a recent study.
The BBC has a short video clip online.
The experiment adds rooks, a member of the Corvid family, to the list of animals that create and use tools. Unlike most known tool-using species, such as chimpanzees or other types of crows, rooks do not appear to use tools in the wild. However, previous studies have shown that capuchin monkeys are more likely to resort to tool use in labs than in the wild.
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Rooks may simply be too lazy to bother making tools in the wild, write the study authors: “Rooks exploit a number of different, readily-available food sources, such as seeds, insects, carrion, and refuse and as such may lack the motivation to use tools in the wild.”
The researchers also argue that the tool-making is an example of an original insight, since the birds in the study were hand-raised and had neither seen other birds attempt the task, or practised the task themselves before solving it.
They add that the birds may have independently evolved a kind of problem-solving intelligence comparable to primate intelligence.
The paper should be available on this link by the end of the week: