Transcript: Hook, Line and Sinker

NARRATOR: The idea that crow intelligence was worth studying came from a tiny French island, seven hundred kilometers off the coast of New Zealand, that’s home to arguably the smartest crow species in the world.

In 1993, scientists from the University of Auckland discovered that New Caledonian crows had an ability long thought to be the domain of humans and great apes, the ability to use tools.

RUSSELL GRAY: It’s a bit of a puzzle, why is it that it really is just is this one species of New Caledonian crow, stuck on a relatively small island in the Pacific that uses these really complex tools.

NARRATOR: Russell Gray is part of the team that made that first astonishing discovery and he continues to return to the island to study these remarkable birds.

Alex Taylor has spent the last two years on the island living with the crows and conducting experiments.

ALEX TAYLOR: When it comes to biodiversity it’s on the kind of top ten hot spots of the world, there’s just so much stuff here that just doesn’t live anywhere else. And especially with the insects and the plants there’s tons that’s not even been documented. So it’s kind of a really special place.

NARRATOR: What’s truly remarkable is that New Caledonian crows don’t just use tools, they make them as well.

RUSSELL GRAY: It was really amazing to see that they’d go through this long, complex sequences of actions. It wasn’t just one step like rip off a stick, and it wasn’t even two steps, it was breaking off at a difficult place of the branch below a fork, trimming off the side branches, and then crafting away at the base of the fork to get a really functional hook tool. And that was really amazing to see an animal, knowing there’s some food there, putting all of this effort into getting it’s tool just right for the job.

ALEX TAYLOR: There’s really three species that make tools – elephants, chimpanzees and New Caledonian crows. So just three out of like, you know, six million or whatever there is on the planet.

People went wild when Jane Goodall found that chimps could actually use tools at all, and the chimpanzees have never been found to use hooks in any kind of way, so to find a crow species that’s doing, using tool use and making tools in a much more sophisticated way than the chimps, really I think it hit everyone’s radars.

RUSSELL GRAY: Sometimes you see really complex things but there’s some simple trick to it, some lower level behavior that underlies it.

Well, any behavior you see like that in the wild, makes you think, it makes you think – I really need to do an experiment.

ALEX TAYLOR: First we put the meat into the hole, put the long stick in the tool box, right at the back, out of reach of the crow, and put a short tool in front of the box.

NARRATOR: It’s one thing to use a tool to get food, but to use a tool to get another tool to get food requires much more complex cognitive powers. This meta tool use, as it’s called, is considered to be crucial in the evolution of humans.

ALEX TAYLOR: The thing that sparked the technical evolution in humans was when we started using rocks not to crack nuts or bones or other bits of food but used them to crack other rocks so it’s really interesting to find a crow species can actually do this meta tool use, because then we start having some kind of idea of the kind of cognitive abilities our early ancestors might have had.

NARRATOR: Just how smart are these wild New Caledonian crows? In an experiment that has never been tried before this crow will be challenged to push his abilities to the next level.

ALEX TAYLOR: We’re looking to see if the crow can act out a three step plan, think like three chess moves in to the future, and pull up the string to get the short tool, take the short tool to get the long tool, and then take the long tool to get the food.

This should be really… I’m really fascinated by this. I really, I really want to see if they are able to do it because, I hope they can but they may just, it may just be too, be like long a distance between their first action with the string and the time they’re getting the food so they’re going to kind of forget what they’re doing once they’re up and string pulling, so I’m really curious how this is going to go…

NARRATOR: This is the first time this experiment has ever been attempted and our cameras are there to record what happens…

ALEX TAYLOR: The crows have done amazingly well, really surprisingly well. We didn’t expect them to be this good at these kinds of problems.