▲ 101 points
back
16 comments
For those interested in animal intelligence, I recommend watching "A Murder of Crows", a short documentary about crow intelligence that's available free online. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/a-murder-of-crows/in...
Crows are one of the only other animals that can make and use tools. In fact, crows probably spend more time building their tools than any other animal than humans; they carefully clip the limbs from a tree branch, whittle it down, and fashion it into an effective hook. The documentary also shows some intelligence tests in which crows perform almost as well as human children.
Corvids seem incredibly intelligent despite their tiny brains. I do not understand how they can tell one human from another, but they do. A rook makes her presence known to me unobtrusively every morning as I walk into work, and in return I leave some of my scone behind where she will find it. She is then joined by two other birds.
Minor commment, in that page they state that crows live everywhere except antartica.
But I've never seen one in south america (traveled a bit around there) and it looks like wikipedia haven't as well.
Good point. While the family Corvidae (Corvids, which includes Jays) is found in South America, the genus Corvus ("Crows") is absent there. So for PBS to be correct you have to read "Crows" as "the Crow family".
The Kea of New Zealand are similarly intelligent. Some of the stuff they can do is fascinating.
Obligatory David Attenborough documentary on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAhzmULgoqI (the 'full' one has screwed-up framing)
I rescued a fledgling crow this year by getting him/her past a rough spot in the early days of independence. It made a complete mess of my office but it was one of the most rewarding things I did this year, incredible how smart that little bird was. Eventually it moved to the garden of a friend and from there joined regular crow life.
> Crows are one of the only other animals that can make and use tools
"Goodall observed other chimpanzees picking up leafy twigs, stripping off the leaves and using the stems to fish for insects. This change of a leafy twig into a tool was a major discovery. Prior to this, scientists thought that only humans manufactured and used tools, and that this ability was what separated humans from other animals.[19] In 1990, it was claimed the only primate to manufacture tools in the wild was the chimpanzee.[20] However, since then, several primates have been reported as tool makers in the wild"
yes, several examples besides crows, I just pointed one, not sure why I was downvoted
Here's a youtube of the same documentary (A Murder of Crows) for folks outside the US:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s472GjbLKQ4
Edit: anecdotally I've seen similar behavior and intelligence demonstrated by African Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus)
PBS aired a fascinating documentary earlier this year about an orangutan that was taught sign language in the 70s by being raised on a college campus as a "human child", explores both the personal side and ethical issues. I was surprised I had never heard of him, and even more surprised to find that he now lives at the zoo a few miles from my house. I had no idea.
Video here, I'm not sure if this plays outside the US: http://video.pbs.org/video/2365286726/
Project Nim was very similar except Nim was a chimpanzee.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814836
Unfortunately, it doesn't really have a happy ending and brings up a lot of ethical issues.
"Forest Person", that's cool. I found it funny that I automatically assumed "Learns to fish" meant our 'advanced' version of fishing, but I guess catching fish and eating it in any way is still fishing.
The fact that they are even smarter makes their being wiped out so quickly even more troubling. We are just scratching the surface of what we can learn of these majestic apes. In indonesia their habitat is being destroyed for palm oil harvesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/deforesta...
I've had the good fortune of visiting Camp Leakey with primatologist Leif Cocks of the orangutan project (http://orangutan.org.au) and they are every bit as intelligent and mischievous as described.
An important side note to this article is that (despite this observed fishing behavior) Orangutans swim, in his words, "like bricks". This leads to a lot of sub speciation either side of river systems and sadly makes migration difficult in what scraps are left of their habitat.
That's awesome.