Читать книгу Extreme Nature - Mark Carwardine - Страница 11

NAME	New Caledonian crow Corvus moneduloides
LOCATION	Pacific island of New Caledonia
ABILITY	thinking up ways to get at hard-to-reach food

© Ron Toft

Quite a few non-human animals, from sea otters to woodpecker finches, use tools and sometimes even craft them. It’s usually assumed that the animal that is best at this is our nearest relative, the chimpanzee. Chimps use rocks to crack nuts and cut and fashion twigs or blades of grass to fish in mounds for termites. These are ‘cultural’ skills, practised only by certain groups of chimps and taught to youngsters. The skills are certainly sophisticated: an anthropologist once spent several months with a group of chimps trying to learn the art of termite fishing and finally achieved the proficiency, he reckoned, of a four-year-old chimp novice.

For pure innate, instant ingenuity, though, it would be hard to top the New Caledonian crow. In an experiment in a lab, meat was put in a little basket at the bottom of a perspex cylinder – and a female crow, Betty, was given a straight piece of wire. Holding the wire in her beak, she tried to pull the basket up, and failed. Then she took the wire to the side of the box holding the cylinder, poked it behind some tape and bent the end into a hook. She went back, hooked the basket, and got the meat. When the experiment was repeated, Betty did roughly the same thing, but with the addition of two different tool-making techniques. In the wild, New Caledonia crows make food-hooks out of twigs, by snipping off all but one protuberance. But bending a piece of wire … how would a crow know?