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Stone the crows! Birds as smart as apes
A New Zealand study has found that New Caledonian crows are as intelligent as apes when it comes to foraging for food. Researchers at Auckland University placed the crows in a situation where they were required to carry out a sequence of tasks using tools to get food.
The crows had to first use a short stick to extract a longer stick from a barred box, which could in turn be used to extract out-of-reach food from a hole. The study suggested that the birds solved the task by reasoning rather than using trial and error or previous learning, according to the research published in this month's Current Biology journal.
"Tool use is a major turning point in species evolution," said one of the researchers, Professor Russell Gray, a psychologist.
"New Caledonian crows have, quite surprisingly, exhibited intelligence at the same level as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem"
Stone the crows! Birds as smart as apes
A New Zealand study has found that New Caledonian crows are as intelligent as apes when it comes to foraging for food. Researchers at Auckland University placed the crows in a situation where they were required to carry out a sequence of tasks using tools to get food.
The crows had to first use a short stick to extract a longer stick from a barred box, which could in turn be used to extract out-of-reach food from a hole. The study suggested that the birds solved the task by reasoning rather than using trial and error or previous learning, according to the research published in this month's Current Biology journal.
"Tool use is a major turning point in species evolution," said one of the researchers, Professor Russell Gray, a psychologist.
"New Caledonian crows have, quite surprisingly, exhibited intelligence at the same level as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem"
