Rather than rewrite everything myself I will just reblog this post on a new study of crow intelligence that I found on WEIT. For what it’s worth, I believe there was a paper a year or two ago that found human children performed about the same in these tasks as crows did. I will have to go reread it before I can say for sure though.
In the Aesop fable “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a thirsty crow manages to get water out of a near-empty jar by dropping pebbles into it, raising the water level so he could reach it with his beak. The moral was “Little by little does the trick.”
That fable is a title reference in a new a new paper in PLoS ONE by Sarah Jelbert et al. (reference and free download below), showing that crows can not only displace water this way—in this case to get a treat, not a drink—but also understand some principles of water displacement: use heavy rather than floating “stones,” avoid hollow objects, use vessels where the water level is higher rather than lower, and—it doesn’t work with sand.
The authors used six wild New Caledonian Crows (Corvus moneduloides), a species already known for its smarts and its ability to use tools (see…
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