Alex Kacelnik discusses tool use in crows in popular podcast “Okay, but… birds”
Last month, Dr. Scott Taylor from “Okay, but… birds” sat down with Alex Kacelnik to dig into one of the most mind-bending questions in animal behavior: are birds actually building and using tools?
There are many bird podcasts out there, but “Okay, but… birds,” hosted by evolutionary biologist Dr. Scott Taylor, is probably one of the most praised at the moment. Scott, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, tackles a wide range of avian topics, from bird monogamy to bird flu and urban birds, and keeps the audience glued to their headphones thanks to his distinctively informal and humorous language. His guests are primarily academics and science communicators, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and our PI Alex Kacelnik, who appears in the show’s 18th episode, “Tool Game Elite.”
In this episode, Scott asks Alex about his influential experiments on New Caledonian crows, a species widely recognized for its intelligence.
“I think it’s fair to think of intelligence as the kind of things that you can solve flexibly,” says Alex. “If you have to face different problems only have one way to do it, as soon as the problem changes one little bit, you just can’t solve it anymore. I dont think it makes sense to call that intelligent. But if you can accept all kind of transformations of the problems and still achieve your goals, then I would call that behavior intelligent.”
So what exactly did these birds do to demonstrate such remarkable cognitive abilities? In the episode, Alex describes several experiments that reveal striking tool-related intelligence in New Caledonian crows.
In one study, the birds were presented with two pieces of wire: a straight one and a pre-bent hook. The male immediately selected the hook to retrieve food from a tube. The female, however, solved the problem more creatively. She took the straight wire, carried it to a hard surface, and bent it into a hook herself. She then used this self-made tool to extract the food—one of the first documented cases of an animal actively reshaping an object to achieve a specific goal. “Fortunately, my student Alex Weir was there when it happened and filmed it,” Alex notes.
In the rest of the episode, Alex discusses further intriguing examples of tool use in other corvids such as rooks and Hawaiian crows, as well as in keas, a New Zealand parrot species—all of which display forms of flexible problem-solving that many researchers interpret as a sign of intelligence. But we won’t give away the rest: tune in to the podcast t to hear the full story.
