Posted: 4/11/2005 7:56:19 AM EDT
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"Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows Bird with a wireIn the Brevia section of the 9 August 2002 issue of Science, Weir et al. report a remarkable observation: The toolmaking behavior of New Caledonian crows. In the experiments, a captive female crow, confronted with a task that required a curved tool (retrieving a food-containing bucket from a vertical pipe), spontaneously bent a piece of straight wire into a hooked shape -- and then repeated the behavior in nine out of ten subsequent trials. Though these crows are known to employ tools in the wild using natural materials, this bird had no prior training with the use of pliant materials such as wire -- a fact that makes its apparently spontaneous, highly specific problem-solving all the more interesting, and raises intriguing questions about the evolutionary preconditions for complex cognition. The crow's behavior was captured on an unusual video clip, available on Science Online." Quicktime movie... www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/weirmovie.mov www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow "Bill owns a company that manufactures and installs car wash systems. Magic Wand Car Wash Systems just in case you want to buy one. Bill's company installed a car wash system in Frederick, Md. for a gentleman. Now understand that these are a complete system including the money changer and money taking machines. The problem started when the new owner complained to Bill that he was loosing significant amounts of money from his coin machines each week. He went as far as to accuse Bill's employees of having a key to the boxes and ripping him off. Bill just couldn't believe that his people would do that. So they setup a trap for the thief. Well they caught the thief in the act! Scroll down to see the thief. The bird had to go down in the machine and back up to get to the money! ... www.utahbirds.org/BirdStory.htm  Singing Amazon parrot.. Quicktime movie (needs a bit of volume). media.animal.discovery.com/fansites/petstar/videogallery/season3/ep311_winner.html |
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We had a peach-faced sunbird that was relatively intelligent. When I lived in PRK I used to go to a place at the Half Moon Bay harbor, called the Harbor Bar, that not only had THE BEST selections on it's jukebox(how maky jukes you know have "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" and "Kashmir" in them?) but also had a guy that came in there and he owned an African grey that was super intelligent-or very well trained. The guy would buy it a 7UP and the bird would sip it, and he'd ask the bird for a cigarette and the bird would extract one from the pack for him, climb up his shirt to his shoulder and put the cigarette in his mouth for him. It talked fairy well also. I have witnessed crows and wild turkeys that were incredibly intelligent, and some that were incredibly stoopid as well. |
