I used to think crows were just really good at being annoying.
Turns out, they’re also using tools in ways that would make some primates jealous—and I mean that literally. New Caledonian crows, native to a small island in the South Pacific, fashion hooks from twigs to fish grubs out of tree bark, and they don’t just stumble onto this behavior. They actively teach their offspring, refining techniques across generations in what researchers are calling, without much irony, “bird culture.” Betty, a crow studied at Oxford in the early 2000s, bent a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube, something she’d never seen done before. The researchers were stunned. I guess they didn’t expect a bird to out-engineer their graduate students. But here’s the thing: tool use among corvids isn’t some quirky outlier—it’s part of a broader pattern of avian intelligence that we’re only just starting to map properly.
Anyway, crows aren’t alone in this. Ravens cache food and recieve information from watching others fail or succeed, adjusting their hiding strategies accordingly. Cockatoos in Indonesia use up to three different tools in sequence to access seeds—a level of sequential problem-solving that’s rare outside mammals.
The Neuroscience Behind Feathered Geniuses: Why Bird Brains Aren’t an Insult Anymore
For decades, scientists assumed intelligence required a mammalian neocortex, which birds definately don’t have. Instead, they’ve got something called a pallium—a densely packed cluster of neurons that does similar computational work but in a totally different architectural layout. The neuron density in a crow’s brain rivals that of some primates, which is wild considering their skulls are, like, the size of a walnut. Studies using fMRI scans on corvids show activity in regions analogous to the prefrontal cortex when they’re solving puzzles, suggesting they’re genuinely thinking through problems, not just running instinct scripts. Honestly, it makes you wonder what else we’ve been getting wrong about non-mammalian cognition.
Wait—maybe the most unsettling part is their memory. Crows remember human faces for years, and they hold grudges. In a study at the University of Washington, researchers wore masks while trapping crows, and those birds—plus other crows who’d never been trapped—divebombed anyone wearing that mask for over a decade afterward. They taught each other who the enemy was.
What Tool Use Reveals About Evolutionary Pathways and Convergent Problem-Solving Across Species
The evolutionary distance between birds and mammals is roughly 300 million years, give or take, which means tool use evolved independently in both lineages—a textbook case of convergent evolution. Parrots, especially kea from New Zealand, manipulate objects with their tongues and beaks in ways that suggest they’re mentally simulating outcomes before acting. That’s not rote learning. That’s something closer to imagination, or at least flexible mental modeling, and it’s showing up in creatures whose last common ancestor with us was a lizard-like thing crawling around the Carboniferous swamps. The implications for how intelligence emerges—whether it’s inevitable given certain ecological pressures or just a weird accident—are still being argued over in labs and badly lit conference rooms.
I’ve seen footage of a rook solving an Aesop’s fable-style puzzle—dropping stones into a tube to raise the water level and snag a floating worm. The bird didn’t need training. It just… figured it out. And then it got bored and wandered off, which feels very relatable.
