Bird Brained? Not Really
A new survey is asking nature lovers to scan their gardens for the cleverest bird around – the Rook. Liam Creedon reports
Is a peanut-stealing genius secretly visiting your garden? That is the unlikely question scientists are asking the public this summer as they try and find out just how intelligent some of our back-garden birds might be.
The problem-solving skills of the Blue Tit and the musical ventriloquism of Starlings and parrots are well known. But the focus of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) study this time around is Rooks – a member of the crow family far more likely to be found on farmland than amongst our shrubberies.
Crows, it seems, are clever. Research earlier this year from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, found that New Caledonian Crows, a South Pacific species, had the reasoning ability to match that of a seven-year-old child.
Since the 1990s experts have noticed more and more Rooks leaving their traditional farmland habitats and visiting gardens and urban areas. Rooks have found a veritable smorgasbord of treats awaiting them in our gardens – but their giant beaks left them unable to prize peanuts from feeders designed for birds with much smaller bills. Quickly, the resourceful Rooks learned there was more than one way to crack a nut. Ingenious methods they developed included unhooking feeders so they fell to the ground and gave widespread peanut spillage.
So the BTO want people to record Rook behaviour in their gardens to find out – even more – just how clever they might be.
Clare Simm, Garden Birdwatch development officer for the BTO said: “With increasing urbanisation and changes in land-use, more birds, including Rooks are turning to gardens.
“We know a lot about Rook behaviour in captivity but not in the wild. Gardens provide us with the opportunity to look at problem-solving in Rooks as well as other behaviour thanks to bird feeders. Knowing more about their behaviour gives us more information to help conserve them, should the need arise.”
Rooks have proved startlingly clever in captivity, and research has revealed that they are able to solve complex social and ecological problems.
Laboratory studies at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London, looking at problem-solving behaviour in Rooks, showed they were able to select tools to solve a puzzle in order to retrieve food, by themselves and cooperatively.
“Puzzles provided included using a specific size of stone to open a trap door with food behind, or using one tool to get another in order to get food,” Clare Simm explains. “What stood out most from this study was that Rooks are not thought to use tools in the wild and yet in one test they made a tool – when presented with a small bucket in a tube that contained a worm, and a length of wire next to it, each bird in the study made a hook out of the wire before trying any other way to retrieve the food and used it to pull the bucket up.”
Scientists believe this ability may have come from an ancient ancestor that evolved the skill to use tools, but as the pressure of finding food diminished, the use of tools died out.
The BTO study is interested in six categories of behaviour that Rooks display in gardens: feeding, caching (hiding and storing food), tolerance, object play, socialising and vocalisation. It’s hoped that the survey will provide vital information that couldn’t be gathered any other way into how Rooks use our gardens and eat and save food.
The survey may also reveal whether Rooks can produce novel solutions to the sorts of problems they don’t experience in the wild and will also provide people with the chance to take a closer look at the Rook – one of our most underrated birds.
It’s not all brains and no brawn either. Despite the bald patch of skin below the bill, the Rook is a true stunner. When sunlight catches their feathers, it reveals a striking purplish sheen, as if the bird had been painted in oil.
If you want to look for a Rook visit www.bto.org
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