Stone the crows

Just how clever are our corvid friends? Many of us will have witnessed it ourselves, and it’s long been known that crows are capable of using tools – Oxford researchers made much of the headway into this research by strapping cameras to crows’ heads. However, it transpires that although crows may have a similar level of intelligence as even a seven year old child in some areas, they cannot produce a novel action, after observing another perform the action. This is interesting as they otherwise can show signs of reasoning and advanced learning abilities in an experiment that offered them different sized rocks for different tasks. How then should we be measuring intelligence? What are the implications for the development of human reasoning? There are certainly a lot of interesting questions raised by studying crows that all Psychologists, Natural Scientists and Medics (both Veterinary and human) should consider.