By Anupum Pant
Background
I know I wrote about how smart crows can be a few days back, but even when I wasn’t particularly searching for amazing crow videos, I happened to stumble upon an astounding video of a crow solving some puzzle. I was so blown away by this, that I couldn’t resist sharing another crow post in under two weeks. Hold your hats because this crow, nicknamed 007 will blow them off your heads.
Side note: Want to see a chimpanzee blow your mind? Watch him do a task that more than 95% of the humans wouldn’t be able to do as well as he can do it. – [Working Memory – Chimpanzees vs. Humans]
Alex studies wild birds which he releases after 3 months of research. This one is nicknamed 007 and it is about to attempt what Alex believes is one of the most complex tests for the animal mind ever constructed. The bird is familiar with the individual objects, but this is the first time he is seeing them arranged like this.
This video comes from a BBC show called ‘Inside the Animal Mind‘ hosted by Chris Packham. [Video]
In the video, a wild crow, previously not having learnt anything about the 8-part arrangement of the puzzle, manages to solve it with ease. I would have taken some time to figure out the solution.
8-Part sequence
- The crow pulls out a small piece of stick from a thread.
- It then approaches a box containing a piece of food and figures that it would need a longer stick to get it. It moves on with the smaller stick to take a stone out of another box.
- Takes out another stone
- And one more
- Drops one of the three stones in a box which needs the weight of all three to release a longer stick.
- Drops the second.
- And the third. The longer stick is released. It takes the long stick.
- Finally, the crow uses the longer stick to pull out food from the box mentioned in second point.
How I try to believe it
Although when I say that the crow wasn’t aware of the arrangement, I mean to say that it wasn’t aware of the sequence in which the puzzle was meant to be solved. It seems as if it was trained with the individual tasks.
I’m guessing that the crow was trained for some time to complete the individual tasks separately and not in a particular sequence. The 8-part sequence was probably shown to it for the first time. I may be wrong. But, I think when the speaker says, “The bird is familiar with the individual objects“, my interpretation makes sense.
If I’m wrong, I yield and state that crows are just too intelligent and are going to take over the world in a few hundred years.
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I’m impressed, I have to admit. Rarely do I encounter a blog that’s both educative
and engaging, and let me tell you, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
The problem is an issue that not enough folks are
speaking intelligently about. I’m very happy I stumbled across this during my hunt
for something relating to this.