the rook of fable

More intelligent behavior from birds: this time, rooks using stones to raise the water level in a jar, so they can reach a tasty worm.

I never forget a face

Add one more faculty to the crow repertoire: the ability to recognize and remember human faces. As the video shows, though, the face is all that matters; crows in the experiment couldn't distinguish body shapes.

Thankfully.

[via BoingBoing's McLaren and Torchinsky]

the teacher of crows

Another one I missed in the turbulent finish to the 07-08 school year: the man who taught crows how to use a vending machine. Crows have the intelligence trifecta: causal reasoning, curiosity, and persistence. Watch and be amazed.

Added: Funny he should mention The Birds...

Experts are telling Chicago residents to beware of the birds.

The fiercely territorial behavior of red-winged blackbirds is being blamed on several recent dive-bomb attacks. The birds peck at unsuspecting bicyclists and pedestrians and swipe their hair.

crows using meta-tools

Crows get smarter the more we study them. From a primitive theory of mind to relatively sophisticated tool use, crows continually surprise. Now, crows have been observed using meta-tools in a laboratory setting.

Working with captured wild crows, Russell Gray and his team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand hid a treat in a box so that a crow could only extract it with the help of a long stick. This kind of task is easy for the tool-using crows.

But then the researchers added a twist by placing the long stick in a cage, out of the crows' reach. No problem: the birds used a second, shorter stick, to get the first one, then took it back to the box to get the food.

"Six out of seven crows tried straight away to use the short stick to get to the long tool. There was no trial and error," says Gray.

The seventh crow has been held back a year, despite his parents' wishes.

Update: Chris of Mixing Memory notes,

Recognizing that the long stick is sufficient, but the short one isn't, when looking at the placement of the food, and then understanding that the short stick is sufficient to retrieve the long stick is pretty impressive. I'm not sure it requires analogical reasoning -- association might be sufficient -- but I suspect that future studies will sort all of that out. However they're doing it, it's clear that crows are pretty damn smart.

those happy, happy crows

Do animals have "higher" emotions? Dr. Jonathan Balcombe thinks they might.

Five years ago behaviorist and animal-rights activist Dr. Jonathan Balcombe stood on a Virginia hotel balcony watching two crows intimately groom each other in the comfort of an abandoned billboard. He felt that the birds liked what they were doing, even if engaged in a natural, beneficial act, such as picking parasites off the other's feathers. That moment changed the way he would view animals forever.

"I watched the crows enraptured and had an epiphany," Balcombe says. "I thought, 'Aha! Pleasure,' then started recording observations through pleasure contexts." That led to a book, "Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good" (MacMillan, 2006; $24.95), which is filled with hundreds of examples of animals living it up, thanks to developed senses of touch, taste, sight, sound and smell.

Balcombe recounts a favorite example of Kenyan hippos receiving the hippopotamus equivalent of a high-end spa treatment in a freshwater spring. They splay their toes, open their mouths wide and wait for a school of cleaner fish to remove parasites and slough off dead skin, he recalls. Balcombe knows that the hippos and the fish both benefit from this arrangement. "My interpretation is that it is also enjoyable for them," he says.

The first to admit his premise is hardly unique, Balcombe thinks his work merits a broader look. "Science has neglected this issue," he said. Identifying positive affect has been a part of animal-behavior studies since the 1930s, when Donald Griffin, the noted biologist who discovered that some bats use echolocation to see in the dark, founded the field of animal thinking called cognitive ethology. Balcombe, who believes nature rewards behaviors that promote evolution, wants to take it a step further.

There's reason for skepticism; UW researcher Jim Ha warns of the ever-present danger of anthropomorphism. But the simplistic notion that animals are instinct-driven idiots is more and more untenable by the day.

eat, crow

If you haven't seen this yet, you're missing out. As I blogged about earlier,

It's a credit to humans' basic anthropocentrism that this--the idea that other animals might be as wily, deceptive, and crafty as we are--comes as a surprise.