Aug 16 : New Caledonian crows have the ingenuity to use one tool on another for procuring a snack, a new study appearing online in Current Biology has revealed.

In the study, the researchers presented crows with some meat in a hole and a stick that left the meat out of reach.

The birds needed to get a long stick out of a “toolbox” in order to get the meat from the hole.

However, the long stick was also kept out of reach.

“The creative thing the crows did was to use the short stick to get the long tool out of the box so that they could then use the long stick to get the meat,” said co-researcher Alex Taylor of the University of Auckland.

In a second experiment, the researchers reversed the positions of the two sticks so that the small stick was inside the toolbox and the long stick was handy.

The researchers found that the crows briefly probed the box containing the short stick with the long stick before correcting their error and taking the stick directly to the hole.

Co-researcher Russell Gray, also of the University of Auckland said the birds’ tool-use skills rivalled those seen among great apes.

“It was surprising to find that these ‘bird-brained’ creatures performed at the same levels as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem. Six out of seven birds tried to get the long stick with the short stick at their first attempt at solving the problem,” said Gray.

“To do this, they had to inhibit their normal response of trying to get the food directly with the short stick and realize that they could use the short stick to get the long stick,” he said. (ANI)