In-Flight Albatross Cam Finds the Birds Feeding with Killer Whales

You know what’s super-cool? Putting a lipstick-sized camera on the back of a Black-browed Albatross and turning it loose to forage across the windswept Southern Ocean. That’s what scientists from the National Institute of Polar Research in Japan and the British Antarctic Survey have done with four of the birds, and they’ve wound up with a remarkable albatross-eye view of life pieced together from more than 28,000 photos. They’ve learned that albatrosses sometimes forage in groups, as in the formation shot above (I love the pink feet trailing behind No. 2 and the leader keeping an eye on the others over its shoulder). But there’s more.

Here, at least four albatrosses follow an orca (killer whale), a behavior that hadn’t been documented before. It stands to reason, British Antarctic Survey scientist Richard Phillips said—tropical seabirds sometimes forage with tuna schools, and albatrosses routinely follow fishing vessels. Nevertheless, it’s pretty exciting to get confirmation in an image of these birds coasting behind the whale, almost drafting off its dorsal fin (click for larger version).

I love this vantage point: a single bird high above the water, sizing up a massive iceberg off in the distance. Scientists have been putting instruments on albatrosses and other birds for years now, but this is the first time they’ve brought back pictures. If they can combine this with GPS locations, they’ll gain new insights into albatross behavior and may also learn about vast stretches of ocean that scientists seldom visit—much the way oceanographers are learning about undersea conditions through the totally cool Tagging of Pacific Pelagics program.

The work appears today in the open-access journal PLOS One. Below, a look at the tiny fraction of an albatross’s life spent on land. These highlights were filmed by the British Antarctic Survey at their longtime study site, a breeding colony on Bird Island, South Georgia, about 1,000 miles east of Tierra del Fuego.

See Living Bird magazine for more about the ways industrial fishing is endangering the world’s albatrosses, as well as new techniques to help avoid the impact.

(Images courtesy the National Institute of Polar Research, Japan; video courtesy British Antarctic Survey.)

In Memoriam: 37-Year-Old Golden Eagle, Ithaca

It was with sadness and appreciation we recently heard of the death, at the whopping age of 37, of a Golden Eagle named Ithaca. Jim Grier, now an emeritus professor at North Dakota State University, participated in the captive breeding of Ithaca and two eaglet siblings while he was a graduate student at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, in 1972. The three birds were the first-ever Golden Eagles produced by artificial insemination, a technique then being explored to help captive breeding programs of endangered raptors. The work of Grier and his adviser, Tom Cade, later gave rise to the Peregrine Fund.

In late September, Ithaca succumbed to complications from West Nile virus, which he contracted in 2002. He had a long and distinguished life (by comparison, the oldest known wild Golden Eagle was 28 years old). Highlights included appearing on the Johnny Carson show in the late 1970s, as well as in presentations and live demonstrations to college students and others. Dr. Grier has posted an in memoriam Web page with more information and a series of excellent photos of Ithaca from his first hours to late in his life. It’s well worth a visit. Our sympathies go out to Grier and the rest of eagle Ithaca’s extended family.

(Image: Grier flying a still subadult-plumaged Ithaca in 1972. Courtesy James Grier.)

Maya Lin’s “What Is Missing?” Project Uses Lab Sound, Video

On Thursday, Sept. 17, a new art installation by Maya Lin opened at the California Academy of Sciences. Part of a series entitled “What Is Missing?” the piece is a listening cone of bronze and reclaimed redwood, made to an oversized scale reminiscent of a fallen sequoia log.

Like all of Lin’s work (most famously the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC), “What Is Missing?” is a simple, sleek shape embodying a profound concept, and its power unfolds gradually.

Approach the large end and you’ll hear animal voices wafting from the opening. Images flicker from the dim interior. Look closer, and at the far end, some 20 feet away, you’ll see orangutans, Red Knots, gray wolves, Bald Eagles, a jaguar.

If you have to squint to make out the details; if the sounds reverberate and distort on their way along the passageway, it’s Lin’s way of illustrating both the dimming hopes of endangered species, and the fact that they’re not yet entirely out of our reach. “This Earth is incredibly resilient, and what once was can come back if we let it and we give it space,” Lin said at the opening. “But how can we protect it if we don’t even see it as existing?”

Maya Lin worked closely with scientists at the Cornell Lab to develop soundscapes and video sequences for the project, drawing on the Macaulay Library’s holdings—the largest archive of animal sound and behavior in the world. Lab director John Fitzpatrick visited the California Academy and spoke at the opening, saying

At the Cornell Lab we have revered sound ever since the first sophisticated recording devices were invented. Just as acoustic communication is ubiquitous and essential in the bird world, natural sounds also can evoke powerful emotional and subjective reactions, as well as intellectual ones, among humans. In What is Missing?, Maya Lin’s genius is to juxtapose scientifically documented sounds, images, and facts in imaginative ways that connect individuals to a natural world that is indeed on the verge of going missing. We cannot imagine a more important use of the assets so carefully gathered and archived through the decades at the Cornell Lab.

Lab bioacoustics researcher Chris Clark helped compile a piece for the project that helps people realize how loud the ocean is for the animals that live in it. Fitzpatrick, along with several Macaulay Library archivists, helped choose recordings of Common Loons, humpback whales, prairie-chickens, sea turtles, pronghorns, and coral reefs.

If you can’t get to San Francisco for the exhibit itself, see this short video exploration of the installation from the Bay Area News Group. It gives a much better sense of the atmosphere of the piece than still photos can.

In addition to this installation, “What Is Missing?” includes a traveling exhibit (which debuted in Beijing and is now in New York City), and in coming months an online component and a video to be displayed on the MTV billboard in Times Square. The traveling exhibit is another remarkable concept: a darkroom in which videos are projected from panes in the floor. Visitors walk through the room catching the projections on translucent screens they carry in their hands. Marvelous, poignant, and hopeful all at the same time.

(Image: Lab Director John Fitzpatrick contemplates “What Is Missing?” by Maya Lin. Photo by Ellen Shershow Peña)

Bird-Friendly Coffee Tasting at the Lab This Weekend

Not many of the things you do that are good for the planet—carrying cloth bags to the store; screwing in compact fluorescent light bulbs—can compare with the sensory abandon of a fresh-brewed cup of bird-friendly coffee. If you haven’t tasted it for yourself recently, then this weekend at the Cornell Lab is your chance.

There are two starkly different ways of growing coffee in the tropics: the traditional method of raising coffee bushes under a canopy of shade trees, and a newer method of growing coffee out in the full sun. The second method produces more coffee but requires more fertilizers and pesticides, and offers few places for birds to live.

Scientists have been alert to this issue for two decades, and the word has been slowly, er, filtering out to the birding community about how different the two growing methods are. And yet many birders still aren’t aware that they can buy organic, shade-grown, and even “bird-friendly” certified coffee in most good coffee shops. It’s a win-win. The coffee is often the same price as other premium coffees (you can brew your own for far less per cup than you pay over the counter). And the deep, rich flavor—redolent of dappled hillsides, strangler figs, and tanagers—far surpasses the flatter taste of sun-grown coffee.

If you’re near Sapsucker Woods this Sunday (11 a.m.-3 p.m.), come by the Cornell Lab for a free tasting, information on the various levels of coffee certification, and how and where to ask for shade-grown coffee. Or visit us the next evening for our free Monday Night Seminar series. Russ Greenberg, director of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, will talk about the science behind shade-grown coffee and the good it does for migratory songbirds.

(Personal experience: In the early 1990s I studied birds in a Panamanian shade coffee plantation for the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. It was one of the most phenomenal places I’ve ever lived: teeming with tanager flocks, Red-headed Barbets, Emerald Toucanets and Fiery-billed Aracaris, the occasional Turquoise Cotinga, swarms of army ants, giant indigo snakes, amazing golden scarab beetles, even a Resplendent Quetzal—all on work time! I’ve been drinking shade coffee ever since.)

Chipping Toward Fall Migration

We’re rounding the corner into fall, and birders are already hearing the calls of migrant birds as they pass overhead at night. Here’s Lab researcher Lewis Grove’s first post in our series covering the exciting fall migration season:

August has a reputation for being a slow month for woodland birding. The dawn chorus has dried up into just a trickle of singing—a vireo here, a warbler there—and it’s nothing like the early morning cacophony of early summer.

But there are still plenty of birds—and even some genuine migration—filling the quiet woodlands of August.

You might think fall migration is still a month or more off, along with changing leaves and frosty mornings, but the great movement starts just after the summer solstice. Shorebirds take off from the rocky arctic coasts; Broad-winged Hawks drift lazily south from the boreal forest; and songbirds, those ebullient vocalists who fill our spring and early summer mornings, begin to long for warmer climes. Many are embarking on their first fall migration, heading for locales they’ve never seen and relying on instincts honed over millions of generations.

Of course, most of the action happens at night, where it’s hard to see but easy—and fascinating—to hear. Last spring on this blog we began listening to some of the nocturnal flight calls of migration. And while spring is a perfectly fine time to start in on flight calls, the real action is now.

For the next few months the traffic over our heads will pick up tremendously. A river of birds will fly south, swollen with millions of young-of-the-year. Some nights may resemble a noisy highway, with hundreds of flight calls streaming down per hour.

For more than two weeks already, observers around the country have been hearing big flights of Yellow Warblers, Veeries, and Chipping, Brewer’s, and Vesper sparrows. This fall we’ll highlight commonly heard species and give you tips on when, where, and how to best appreciate the wonder of nocturnal migration. It can be a bit daunting at first, as unidentified short calls drift down from a dark sky; but once you’ve grasped it, we think you’ll agree that it’s the best way to appreciate an amazing natural phenomenon!

New to the world of flight calls? Get up to speed with audio and video tutorials from last spring’s migration:
Let’s Go Birding at Night… Blindfolded and
How to See a Sound That’s a Half-Second Long,
and check back regularly this fall for the latest on what’s flying over your house.

(Image: Yellow Warbler in flight by Jim Gilbert from Birdshare)

AOU Friday: Learning How Birds Learn

Songbirds like this Northern Mockingbird are one of only three groups of birds that can do vocal learning.

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On Friday in Philadelphia, Dr. Colleen McLinn started her day learning about how birds learn their songs, and hearing new discoveries about the parts of their brains they use to do it. Here’s Colleen:

I spent this morning at Erich Jarvis’s keynote address on bird brains and song learning. I had never seen him speak before, but after watching him in a NOVA special I was convinced he is perhaps the Ben Franklin for the neurobiology generation: a renaissance person engaged in truly interdisciplinary work comparing song learning in birds to speech in humans.

Jarvis’s talk kicked off an intense but fascinating morning session called “Communication in Birds and Brains.” Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Duke University, is interested in how the brain controls complex behavior, and noted that bird song is one of the best-studied nonhuman animal behaviors. He particularly seeks to understand how various brain regions control behavioral traits, as well as the evolutionary history of those brain regions.

But first, he had to define vocal learning and explain how it differs from auditory learning, which is rather more widespread among animals. Many species make sounds such as barks or buzzes, and use them to do things like find mates or defend territories. This auditory learning involves comprehension and usage—abilities most animals have, including dogs that can learn simple commands such as “give it here.”

But few animals, and only three groups of birds, have the capability for vocal learning. These include the parrots (natch), the songbirds, and the hummingbirds (a surprising recent discovery). Five groups of mammals are now thought to be vocal learners: humans, whales and other cetaceans, bats, and perhaps elephants and sea lions.

Jarvis is interested in this rarer trait: how and why vocal learning happens, and how it evolved.

Vocal learners mimic sounds they hear, and then modify them to create new sounds. This may not be as much mindless parroting as we used to think—and here Jarvis singled out Irene Pepperberg in the audience, whose experiments with Alex the African Grey Parrot showed that he understood the semantics of a question like “How many total?” well enough to count and reciprocally communicate to Irene that two beads and four beads made “six.”

As for how vocal learning happens, Jarvis and colleagues reported in a staggering series of publications that while all birds use parts of the brain stem to produce songs, those with learned songs also use parts of the forebrain. Birds that learn their songs may even have more than one pathway controlling their learning. One pathway may promote variability in songs while another pathway produces more consistency, or stereotyping. The proper balance between the two pathways allows for vocal learning.

As perhaps a piece of anatomical support for this idea, it appears that birds that learn their songs activate seven specific brain nuclei as they vocalize: three in a forebrain pathway related to mimicry and four in a brain-stem pathway related to sound production.

Jarvis basically threw out the window the received wisdom that humans’ large brain size and extensive brain folding are the explanation for our complex language. When he and colleagues described in 2005 how bird song and human speech actually make use of the same three forebrain regions, it made a splash. People reportedly called Webster’s and asked them to remove the term “bird brain” from the dictionary.

An accidental discovery in 2008 led Jarvis to propose a new idea about vocal learning that involves, of all things, motor coordination. He was comparing the brains of migratory and nonmigratory birds as part of a separate project. To his surprise he found that when the birds flapped, the movement stimulated brain regions next to the areas responsible for song learning.

After another series of experiments, Jarvis found that movement activates seven specific brain regions—but only in vocal learners. It appears that a mutation has caused a connection between motor learning pathways and vocal pathways in these birds.  Jarvis believes this kind of mutation—a kind of chance connection between two pre-existing neural pathways—provides an elegant and plausible answer to why a handful of different species have independently evolved vocal learning.

Jarvis ended by discussing the case of Snowball the dancing cockatoo, as a test for his motor theory of vocal learning.  If motor learning pathways have indeed been modified to be used in vocal learning, you might expect that vocal learners would have a better sense of rhythm and be better able to synchronize their motions to a musical beat than nonvocal learners. This is indeed the case when we compare Snowball’s moves to those of some other bird species (and even to some humans). From babbling babies to feathered versions of the Backstreet Boys, the neurobiology of imitation and vocal learning is weirder and wilder than I ever knew.

Thursday at AOU: A New Kind of Conservation for Kirtland’s Warblers

The Lab’s director, John Fitzpatrick, spent Thursday afternoon learning about a new concept in conservation, and how it might be applied to ensure that the endangered Kirtland’s Warbler remains a part of our world into the future. Here’s Fitz:

One of the most moving symposia on the meeting’s first day was an afternoon session on what biologist Mike Scott calls “conservation-reliant species.” The term applies to species that we can probably save from extinction, but not without perpetual conservation investments by humans.

The California Condor and a number of Hawaiian birds were discussed as examples, but the presentation that really caught my attention was on Kirtland’s Warbler, the bird with perhaps the smallest total breeding range of any bird in North America. Carol Bocetti, current chair of the Kirtland’s Warler Recovery Team, outlined the history and causes of this bird’s near-extinction (just 170 breeding pairs survived in the early 1970s).

The Kirtland’s Warbler’s extreme habitat specialization—on young, fire-maintained jack pine forests in Michigan—made things bad enough, but the spread of Brown-headed Cowbirds, which lay their eggs in other birds’ nests at the expense of their hosts, nearly doomed the species. Kirtland’s Warblers are alive today only because of massive and ongoing eradication of cowbirds, combined with annual clearing and replanting of thousands of acres of jack pine forest.

Amazingly, these desperate-sounding conservation actions, combined with constant research and monitoring, have been staggeringly successful! This year, researchers counted more than 1,800 pairs of Kirtland’s Warblers, and the species now breeds in 14 counties in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula and six counties of the Upper Peninsula, plus places in adjacent Ontario and Wisconsin. The species is getting more numerous every year, and has now well exceeded the original recovery target of 1,000 breeding pairs.

So, is it time to delist the species? Not so fast! Doing so would cut off the source of financial support for the very conservation actions that caused the turnabout. If cowbirds were to have free rein once again, and if land managers stopped clearing and replanting jack pine stands, the Kirtland’s Warbler would be doomed to repeat its earlier catastrophic collapse.

Bocetti proposed a novel answer: establish a Kirtland’s Warbler conservation partnership: a signed agreement involving federal, state, and local agencies, nonprofits, and even private timber companies. Because jack pines are valuable as pulp wood, annual clearing of pine stands in 50-year rotations could both earn money and save the species, as long as enough land is involved. Bocetti estimated a total of 190,000 acres under management would yield the 38,000 acres of usable habitat required to support 1,000 warbler pairs at any one time.

Key to this partnership would be creation of a permanent endowment that could yield the annual funds needed to control cowbirds and manage habitat. To this end, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation recently named the Kirtland’s Warbler in its list of 10 “keystone species,” making it eligible for federal grants on a 10-year plan to create the endowment.

I was lucky enough to encounter Carol Bocetti in the food line at the Philadelphia Zoo, and we had dinner together. A vibrant and articulate optimist, Carol is jubilant about the emerging success of the Kirtland’s Warbler story. She believes that 10 years from now, the species could be permanently removed from the Endangered Species List despite its perpetual status as a “conservation reliant species.” I’ve never heard of such a plan before, and I love it.

(Image: Kirtland’s Warbler; James Fox/ Birdshare)

AOU Thursday: Hope for Solving Bird Collisions

Here’s Lab research associate Dr. Caren Cooper with a report from Thursday’s session at the American Ornithologists’ Union meeting in Philadelphia.

On Thursday afternoon I went to a session titled Anthropogenic Structures, which is how ornithologists refer to birds hitting things that people have built. Millions of birds die each year in collisions with communication towers, windows, and airplanes, but researchers are devising ways to help that are both inventive and practical.

Communication towers
Joelle Gehring of Central Michigan University spoke about the dangers of communications towers. Birds are more likely to hit towers in bad weather and more likely to hit taller towers or towers that have guy wires, she said. But we can’t control the weather and it’s hard to change tower heights or support systems once they’re up. Fortunately, Gehring has discovered that one easy-to-change feature strongly affects collision rates: the lights on the towers.

Through careful experiments, Gehring and her colleagues have learned that simply replacing non-blinking lights with blinking lights can greatly reduce bird mortality. With such a simple and elegant solution, why can’t we change all the lights right now? How many ornithologists does it take to change a light bulb? Assuming that air traffic authorities can determine that we’ll be safe in the air with blinking lights on towers, maybe it won’t be long until this happens. Gehring expects that as soon as the U.S. adopts blinking lights for towers, Canada will soon follow… and then other countries too! The same issues stand for wind-energy turbines, and so you may notice that new wind turbines near you already have blinking lights.

Window strikes
Far and away the most common source of collisions is with windows. Dan Klem, of Muhlenberg College, has worked on this deadly problem for years, and has recently developed windows that birds can see—by exploiting an unusual aspect of birds’ vision. Birds’ eyes have an extra type of color-detecting cell that humans don’t have: it allows them to see in ultraviolet (technically, in the 300-400 nanometer part of the spectrum).

This ability lets kestrels track field mice by following their UV-reflecting urine trails. Male and female Blue Tits in English gardens look the same to us, but to the birds themselves, males have much fancier-looking heads. (Some clever studies have explored these plumage differences by applying UV-blocking sunscreen to feathers.)

Klem reasoned that if he could make a UV-reflecting glass, birds could see and avoid it while people would still get the same great views. The problem is that most window glass is designed to absorb UV, not reflect it. So Klem is working on films or plastic strips (one amusingly called CollidEscape) that can be applied to windows and that make prominent patterns in UV.  So far, studies done in wind tunnels show that these special patterns are nearly as good at reducing collisions as glass painted with bright orange stripes.

The scientist involved in that study, Christine Sheppard of the American Bird Conservancy, pointed out that we often regard birds’ inability to see glass as a flaw, but we should remember that people can’t see glass either – that’s why we like it. Sheppard had the audience laughing sympathetically as she showed video from a hidden camera of person after person walking into a very clean pane of glass that looked like the exit to a store. Sheppard pointed out that humans walk into glass and then learn to pay better attention, but when birds hit glass, they die.

Bird-airplane collisions
Pete Marra of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center discussed an aspect of bird collisions that gets a lot more public attention: birds that hit airplanes. An estimated 7,400 bird strikes happened in the U.S. in 2007, he said. That’s compared to 30 million take-offs and landings each year, and a total of 229 human deaths and 210 crashed planes from bird strikes since 1988. (Strike numbers are estimated because only the U.S. military is required to report them.)

After Flight 1549 made its famous splashdown in the Hudson River earlier this year (with no injuries to passengers or crew), the Smithsonian Institution’s bird feather identification lab used tissue and feather remains to confirm that Canada Geese took out two of the plane’s engines. It may seem like a question only a birder would ask, but Marra immediately wanted to know whether the geese were migrants or residents—and determined that these geese were migratory, and probably from Greenland.

Knowing the species and its origin (resident or migrant) is essential, Marra said, because they point to very different solutions. If resident species are the problem, we could cull them, modify habitat near airports, or displace them. Migrants are more difficult, but we can at least track the risk by watching their movements on radar.

Marra suggests we push for mandatory reporting of all bird strikes so we can at least see the whole problem. Large-bodied birds such as geese and Turkey Vultures are increasing in numbers, and the problem of bird strikes will only get worse if we don’t collect the data we need to manage the risk.

(Image: Black-and-White Warbler by Laura Erickson, via Birdshare)

The AOU Meeting: Blogged by the Scientists!

Quick—which family? (Take David Winkler’s ornithology class to find out.)

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It’s August: time for another annual meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union. Just like last year in Portland, hundreds of ornithologists are pouring in for three days of concentrated science—this time to the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

This year, we’ll be posting updates written by Lab scientists about the things they find most interesting each day. First up is Dr. Elise Ferree, a postdoctoral associate who studies Western Bluebirds. She arrived early for a symposium on innovative ways to teach ornithology. Here’s her report:

Wednesday, 5:30 pm The AOU conference has not yet officially started, but I’ve been to my first event already: a workshop on innovative teaching. I wasn’t the only one who thought this workshop was worth an early arrival: the room was packed.

David Winkler, one of Cornell’s own, went first. Winkler’s take-home message, after 20 years of teaching ornithology, centered on the importance of students learning ALL of the bird families of the world. Since I, like most American students, learned only the 108 or so families that occur in North America, I had to do a little research to find that the world contains 231 bird families, including oddities such as the Kagu (family Rhynochetidae) and the mesites (family Mesitornithidae).

But among the benefits of this harrowing exercise, Winkler said, are the chance to give students a sense of the diversity of birds, equip them with the broadest possible framework for understanding birds, and (if necessary) teach them a bit of humility. Now that I am on the instructor side of the classroom, I think teaching the birds of the world sounds like a great idea!

Two professors faced with limited resources still found ways to bring birds to the students and get students outside to watch birds. Margaret Voss from Penn State Erie has her students work with CamClickr, one of the Lab’s citizen science projects. Using webcams hidden in nest boxes across the country, CamClickr lets students study nesting birds without leaving the classroom.

Students look at dozens of photos—eggs, nestlings of all sizes, attentive parents, and more—and they record details like the stage of the nest and the birds’ behavior. The students learn about nesting biology, and Voss helps them develop and test their own ideas in research projects. All the while, students are contributing valuable data to the CamClickr project, helping scientists learn about nesting cycles of many species in great detail. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Margaret Rubega of the University of Connecticut also uses technology—something called Twitter—to teach. I should clarify that I was the only one in the room who does not own a cell phone, and I had no idea how to use Twitter.

But the assignment was simple. Over the semester, students wrote at least five Twitter posts that included the following information: 1. Where am I? 2. What observations can I make about the birds I see? 3. How does this observation relate to something I have learned in ornithology? According to Rubega, her students found the Twitter assignments prompted them to be more observant, helped them remember their lessons, and let them begin to appreciate birds.

Overall this workshop helped me think about how I teach ornithology. As other AOU attendees arrive and settle in to their university dorm rooms, I’m also reminded of the community that these annual meetings create. I’m inspired to work together in our efforts to teach and to learn about birds. It should be a great three days—stay tuned for reports from other participants!

(Image: A subdesert mesite of the family Mesitornithidae, by Ben Rackstraw/Wikipedia)

Video: Rooks Use Rocks to Reach Reward

Does the ingenuity of corvids—crows, ravens, and their relatives—have any limits? Just this week came the news that New Caledonian crows can use three different tools in a row to get a complex task done. Now we learn that the Rook, a European corvid, is savvy enough to displace water using stones.

If that sounds familiar, you may be remembering one of Aesop’s fables, in which a thirsty crow spies some water at the bottom of a long-necked jar. It can’t reach the water to take a drink, but it realizes that by dropping in enough stones it can raise the water level. Satisfaction!

It’s possible Aesop was inspired by seeing a crow or rook do this more than 2,500 years ago. But scientists haven’t seen this kind of problem solving in any animals other than the orangutan – until now. Comparative psychologists from the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London gave a pitcher of water and some stones to four captive Rooks. A worm floated on the water but was too far down the jar for the birds to reach it.

Watch what happens in this great video. A Rook named Connelly bends down and eyes the pitcher’s water level, then starts piling stones into the jar. It takes seven stones in a row, and you can see Connelly periodically looking at his progress. Later experiments showed the birds could judge roughly how many stones would do the trick, they chose to use larger stones over smaller stones, and they realized sawdust would not work in the same way. The work appears today in the journal Current Biology.

See Rooks solve more problems on the Cell Press YouTube channel.

The Rooks in these experiments were captives, and the scientists point out that wild Rooks have never been seen using tools, but they attribute that to a lack of necessity rather than a lack of ingenuity.

(Rooks photographed in Serbia by Dusan Petrovic, via Birdshare)