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Sunday, May 31, 2009

Rooks Use And Construct Tools

Bird brains. There used to be a series years ago where they´d set up a simple mechanism that had to be operated before wild birds could get to nuts or the cream from milk bottles. This article from the BBC reports on rooks, who in the lab are not only able to logically reason that an action has consequence but who seem to go one step further and demonstrate that they are capable of both using and constructing tools in order to get to food, even using two methods in succession to do so. This behaviour is of course common in apes, but rarely in birds. Furthermore this is not seen in the wild, suggesting that the birds may have evolved an innate ability to use tools the past.

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