Share: Crow cameras give a bird’s eye view of tool-making in the wild

Call it a GoCro. Cameras mounted on the tails of wild New Caledonian crows have caught these renowned tool-makers in the act of creating the hooked foraging implements from plants.

New Caledonian crows are the only non-human animals to make hooked tools in the wild. Why they do so is something of a mystery. “The answer to that lies most probably in the ecology of the place and the ecology of these birds,” says Christian Rutz at the University of St Andrews, UK.

Filming their natural behaviour may help us get to the bottom of it.

Back in 2007, Rutz and colleagues equipped crows with video cameras to film their behaviour in the wild. They were able to transmit live pictures, but the range was short, so they had to follow the birds around and the signal would sometimes cut out.

Now Rutz and colleagues have followed the behaviour of 10 crows in a new study with a better camera setup. This enabled them to record about an hour of footage for each bird. They found only four of them used tools during the recording sessions.

It’s unclear whether some crows don’t use tools at all, or if they just didn’t in the time recorded. “I think that’s a very interesting lead for future research,” says Rutz.

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