Bird on a Wire Has News for Scientists

Betty was hungry, but the food was out of reach and the tool she needed to get at it had been swiped by a bully. What to do? Grab some wire, bend it into a hook and get the food.

Betty may be a crow, but she’s no birdbrain.

And she repeated the success over and over, using bent wires to pull the small bucket of food up by its handle. Her exploits are reported in today’s issue of the journal Science.

“We were delighted and extremely surprised,” said Alex Kacelnik, who teaches at England’s Oxford University, where Betty performed her feats.

Kacelnik and his colleagues were trying to determine whether the crows, which have been known to use twigs to pick things up in the wild, could choose the right tool to retrieve food. They did not, however, expect the birds to make their own tools.

It was a surprising development, agreed Richard Banks of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, an expert on North American crows.

Some chimpanzees have been observed using stones to open nuts, and monkeys are known to use sticks to fish bugs out of nests.

“Toolmaking and tool use has always been considered one of the diagnostics of a superior intelligence,” Kacelnik said. “Now a bird is shown to have greater sophistication than many closer relatives of us humans.

“People expect apes to be the pinnacle of intelligence in the animal kingdom because they are our closest relatives, but nature may have reached different solutions to similar problems,” he said.The Oxford researchers gave two crows--Betty and Abel--a bucket of food inside a tube and two pieces of wire, one hooked and one straight.

Soon “the male stole the hooked wire from the female....She then picked the remaining straight wire and bent it herself,” Kacelnik said, adding that she repeated the trick several times.