Eggs Don

Corvids are clever birds. We recently reported on the ability of crows to recognize individual people (I, for one, did miserably on a quiz testing my ability to ID specific crows). Now, researchers—led by the aptly named Christopher Bird, of the University of Cambridge—are reporting that rooks can grasp a concept human babies can’t comprehend until they’re six months old.

The Royal Society explains the experiment, which was published online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B:

Seven rooks were each shown four sets of images during the experiment. Because rooks naturally like to peep through holes, the research team set up an LCD screen behind a wooden board with a small hole in it for the rooks to look through. They then displayed the images on the screen. In each experiment, the birds were shown two images of a possible situation - a Kinder Egg resting on a wooden platform, and two 'impossible images' where the egg was in a gravity-defying position such as floating in thin air above the platform. The rooks spent significantly longer looking at the impossible images than those that were viable, suggesting that rooks don't expect objects to be hovering in mid air.

Not only did the birds understand that contact between the egg and the platform were necessary in order for the object to be supported, but they also had an understanding of the type of contact needed and the amount of contact a concept which is lost on babies until they are over 6 and a half months old, and which chimpanzees never manage to grasp, even as adults.

Read more at the Royal Society.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Shalom)