KEY POINTS:
An Auckland University study has found that New Caledonian crows are as intelligent as apes when it comes to foraging for food.
Researchers placed the crows in a situation where they were required to carry out a sequence of tasks using tools to get food.
The crows had to first use a short stick to extract a longer stick from a barred box, which could in turn be used to extract out-of-reach food from a hole.
The study suggested that the birds solved the task by reasoning rather than using trial and error or previous learning, according to the research published in this month's Current Biology journal.
"Tool use is a major turning point in species evolution," said one of the researchers, Professor Russell Gray, a psychologist.
"New Caledonian crows have, quite surprisingly, exhibited intelligence at the same level as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem."
Great apes such as chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos are regarded as the most intelligent primates after humans.
Professor Gray said crows had often been portrayed in folklore as crafty, cunning creatures, but in the past few years there had been a growing appreciation in the scientific community that there might be a scientific basis to these tales.
"Crows' abilities might reflect a mix of learning appropriate procedures and more complex cognition."
Professor Gray and biologist Dr Gavin Hunt were given $630,000 in taxpayer funding in 2002 to check out whether New Caledonian crows could pass on their food foraging skills to other crows.
- NZPA
