New Caledonian crows are a fascinating species. The corvids tend to be relatively smart birds anyway (some people think they’re smarter than most people; Henry Ward Beecher wrote “Give men wings, and reduce their smartness a little, and many of them would be almost good enough to call crows”). New Caledonian crows, native to several south Pacific islands, are particularly clever tool-makers, fashioning twigs and leaves into bug-gathering utensils that are among the most complex animal-made tools known. Research suggests that their tool-making abilities extend to adapting existing tools for new uses, and sharing these innovations with each other.
Some recent research at the University of Auckland shows that these crows can perform problem-solving feats more typical of great apes and humans than of other animals. They apparently reason by analogy that if they can use a tool to get at food, when the situation requires it they can use one tool to get at another tool that will then allow them to access the food. When a piece of meat was placed out of the birds’ reach in a container, the birds were given a short stick—too short to reach the meat—and a longer stick that would do the job but that was not immediately accessible. Right away they figured out that if they used the shorter stick to poke the longer stick into reach, they could then use the longer stick to get the food. This article from the BBC has more information and also a video showing one of the birds solving the problem and getting the meat. Thanks to Tom for sending this story my way.
If you want to learn more about New Caledonian crows, you might enjoy the crow tool use page maintained by the Behavioural Ecology Research Group at Oxford. The Wikipedia page on New Caledonian crows looks pretty good too.
