Crows at Work

Crows are credited with having great intelligence.  Studies have shown that your average crow can count to six.  That’s not bad, actually.  In my hometown of East Helena, Montana, that level of proficiency in math will get you advanced into eighth grade without further testing.

In addition to the ability to count, some crows exhibit astonishing skills at using tools—especially when foraging for food.  Crows have been observed, for example, manipulating sticks with their beaks.  Sometimes, they will use sticks to probe into deep, otherwise inaccessible holes in trees, in efforts to extract insects.  While crows have not shown any particular talent at using open-end wrenches, ratchets, or pneumatic tools, their use of simple tools is notable nonetheless.  Perhaps, more importantly, studying crows at work has proven a gold mine for a slew of geeky, fast-talking researchers seeking reasons to fly to remote and exotic locations so they might observe a bunch of birds while sipping on pina coladas.

A few crows have even shown a more complex understanding of water displacement.  These crows are purposely confronted with a desirable morsel of food floating in a tube partially filled with water—where the water is deep enough down inside the tube they cannot reach the morsel with their beak.  So challenged, the birds will drop solid objects of the proper size down inside the tube, displacing the water and causing it to rise until such a point where they can reach the food floating atop the water.  This is the sort of behavior that causes scientist to rethink our entire place in the world.  These same experiments have been informally conducted with beer and floating pretzels in several bars in my hometown.  Success in retrieving the pretzels was mixed, but local tavern-goers were more than a little amused that researchers had never heard of a “whiskey ditch” and had never been “fishin’ in a crick.”

Work with crows and the use of tools is ongoing as of this writing.  Studies in East Helena, Montana, have long since been terminated.

-- Mitchell Hegman