Video of Wild Crow Tool Use Caught With Tail Cams

willatnewscientist writes "Scientists from the University of Oxford have recorded New Caledonian crows using tools in the wild for first time. The footage was captured by attaching tiny cameras to their tail feathers. The wireless cameras weigh just 14 grammes and can be worn by the crows without disturbing their natural behavior. The trick has provided the first direct evidence of the birds' using tools in the wild and may represent an important development in animal behavior studies. 'The camera also contains a simple radio transmitter that reveals the crows' location. This lets the researchers track them at a distance of few hundred metres, so that they can catch the camera's video signal with a portable receiving dish. Up to 70 minutes of footage can be broadcast by the camera's chip, and the camera is shed once the bird moults its tail feathers.'"

clever crows

[wizardforce]

but this isnt the first time we've known they use tools. check this out http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7329182515885554944 [google.com] [clever crows]

Old News

[Yold]

Crows have been observed using tools before. A particularly interesting instance of this is when they drop nuts into crosswalks at intersections, wait until cars smash them, observe the pedestrians crossing the street (its safe to cross), and retrieve the nut's meat.

Birds are damn smart, like that talking parrot who just died.

Crows have devised a better way

[Anonymous Coward]

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HmKO-QMyLc4 [youtube.com]

Dropping nuts on a busy road where cars function as nutcrackers..

old news by 2,500 years:

[circletimessquare]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop's_Fables [wikipedia.org]

http://www.ongoing-tales.com/SERIALS/oldtime/FAIRYTALES/aesop8.html [ongoing-tales.com]

A THIRSTY Crow found a Pitcher with some water in it, but so little was there that, try as she might, she could not reach it with her beak, and it seemed as though she would die of thirst within sight of the remedy. At last she hit upon a clever plan. She began dropping pebbles into the Pitcher, and with each pebble the water rose a little higher until at last it reached the brim, and the knowing bird was enabled to quench her thirst.

Moral: Necessity is the mother of invention.

crows and ravens are seen as an intelligent and trickster characters in many ancient cultures around the world, some notable examples of prominent intelligent and tricky crow mythology being from the pacific northwest of north america, and ancient scandinavia

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1326277 [nih.gov]

Re:Fascinating

[GrumpySimon]

The reason for these cameras is to film the New Caledonian Crow. People are very interested in it, because it makes a number of fairly complex tools from twigs/plants to extract grubs from logs. This type of tool use is actually more impressive than what chimps can do, and appear to be showing some form of cumulative cultural evolution.

You can see some more info at the Auckland Crow Group [auckland.ac.nz] webpage, and I wrote a blog post on some recently published work showing the crows successfully doing a meta-tool task (i.e. using a tool, to get a tool, to get food) here [simon.net.nz].

So, the whole point of this arse-cam, is so that we can watch them make tools, use them, and see what else they get up to.

Disclaimer: I work in the same lab with a number of the Auckland crow group and am very good friends with them.

Re:Fascinating

[Bios_Hakr]

I fly RC helis. Even the smaller ones can carry a 200-gram camera with no problem. I've put a small Sony CyberShot on mine and shot some video.

The big problem is vibration. Even is the bigger electrics there is still a lot of HF vibration. It's no so bad when you take shots of the flying field. It sucks when you are trying to spy on the co-eds next door...

Some people have had good luck putting a camera on a motor-assisted sailplane (a.k.a. hotliner) and sending it up 800-feet or so. You turn off the motor and slow the plane way down to get minimal vibration.

Search YouTube for "RC heli on-board video" or, even better, search for "hotliner".