Meet the Genius Bird: Crafty Crows Use Tools to Solve a Three-Step Problem

It's not just that some birds can use tools, as primates can. Their smarts stretch even further: New research this week suggests that New Caledonian crows can solve a three-step problem, in which the three steps must be completed in succession to reach a tasty snack. Alex Taylor and colleagues document this discovery in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Here's the setup: There's a short stick dangling from the bird's perch on a string. That short stick isn't long enough to grab the food that's tucked inside a long and narrow box, but there's a longer stick in a separate box. If the birds could figure out the first two steps—grabbing the short stick, and using it to get the longer stick—then voila, they could use the longer stick to reach the food. The team split the birds into two groups. The birds in group number one got to mess around with each step of the process individually before researchers presented them with the problem as a whole. Coauthor Russell Gray says,