The Birds and their Tools

Alfred Hitchcock loved to terrify people. He delighted in the perverse nature of man's soul and psyche. One film stands out, as the evil was not human, but of the avian type- more appropriately, The Birds.

This article's focus is not to speak about the movie Birds, or Hitchcock's genius (that could be a later blog post) but I wanted to share an interesting article and video that had my memory fetch the imagery above.

They say art mimics real life and in the case of the following article I found, Sir Alfred Hitchcock had his finger on a certain pulse. Watch the video below and then read on...

This video was made during previous experiments. In the Brevia section of the 9 August 2002 issue of Science, Weir et al. report a remarkable observation: The toolmaking behavior of New Caledonian crows. In the experiments, a captive female crow, confronted with a task that required a curved tool (retrieving a food-containing bucket from a vertical pipe), spontaneously bent a piece of straight wire into a hooked shape -- and then repeated the behavior in nine out of ten subsequent trials.

Creepy cool, huh?

So, Oxford scientists have been running experiments with crows, all centered on food retrieval, and recorded that these animals are able to use up to three types of tools in procuring their food. The article I read tested the birds in different scenarios and they were able to adapt and utilize up to 3 different tools to accomplish their task. Now, these Caledonian crows are known to use tools in the wild to retrieve food, but the scientists wanted to see if these birds had cognitive skills beyond non-human or primate animals that showed similar cognitive skills. The results were that the crows could adapt and create tools, sometimes as the need arose, without any previous tool training. Though the researchers stated that these results do not prove complex cognitive abilities, it does mark an example of higher cognitive competence above non-human animals.

So, though modern Cinema would have us believe that our futures would look something like this:

 Rest assured it will most likely resemble this:

Hitchcock was so ahead of his time...love this scene:

 All in all, the future doesn't look too bright for us humans...