Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Every now and then a news story strikes the imagination of virtually every reporter and editor that hears it, so that within days people hear it on radio, television, and their newspapers. Such is the story of Betty the Caledonian Crow. She, and another Caledonian Crow named Abel, are research subjects at Oxford University’s Behavioural Ecology Research Group.

On their native southwestern Pacific island of New Caledonia, a territory of France, crows are known to use twigs and leaves as tools to pull grubs from tight places. In the laboratory, scientists decided to test Betty and Abel to see if they could choose the most effective tool for extracting a piece of meat wedged deep in a long, tight tube. They set out a straight wire and a hooked wire to see if the birds could learn that the hook was more effective than the straight wire at pulling out the meat. Both Betty and Abel quickly learned that the hook-shaped wire was the one that worked.

The problem for Betty was that Abel was stronger and more aggressive, and he stole her hook from her. But rather than whine and bemoan her fate, she ingeniously took her straight wire and wedged the tip in a crack of the tube, bending it with her beak to produce her own hook. The Oxford researchers tested her over and over, offering her only a straight wire, and 9 times out of 10 she quickly fashioned a hook out of it to extract the meat from the tube. She didn’t make the hook the same way each time. Sometimes instead of wedging the wire in a crack, she stood on it while bending it. And she experimented with different ways of wedging the wire to bend it more easily. The scientists didn’t bother to test Abel’s tool-making ingenuity, since dominant male crows too easily get what they want by the simpler strategy of stealing it.

This story appeared in the journal Science on Friday, August 9, 2002, and that same day I read an account of it in the Duluth News-Tribune, an AP article from the New York Times. And then when I opened my e-mail, people had sent me links to the same story, written independently by reporters at the BBC, CNN, and USA Today.

The BBC site had a video clip so I could actually see Betty bending a straight wire into a hook and pulling out her treat–if you want to see it, I’ve made a link to it on my web page, at www.lauraerickson.com. All the newspaper writers were clearly impressed by this ingenious crow’s ability to form a mental image of the tool that worked to get her food, and to devise various ways of making it–something not even our closest relatives the chimpanzees have ever done.

Of course, some scientists are reluctant to give Betty too much credit. Gavin Hunt of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who has spent years studying Caledonian Crows, said that “It is tempting to say that the bird used some kind of insight to access and solve the problem of extracting the food, as humans often do in their toolmaking. However, we need to carry out more experiments to see if this was the case.” I much prefer the simple bluntness of USA Today writer Tim Friend, who wrote, “Scientists aren’t sure what to make of that in animals, but when we do it, it’s called thinking.”