dr. weir wanted to know if they actually
understood how their tools worked and
were the crows really planning ahead to
try and find out he devised an
experiment to see if they could use a
series of tools in the sequence this
experiment is designed to test whether
they can use one tool to retrieve
another tool but they need to get food
so what we've got here is two tubes and
one tube contains some meat at about 25
centimeters inside it and the other tube
contains a long that they can use to get
the meat but it's out of reach of their
beaks his pupil wek has to use a short
tool to retrieve the long tool in a tube
which can then be used to reach the
reward what we're interested in asking
is firstly are they able to do this tool
so they're able to inhibit their desire
to get the meat straightaway and
actually use the tool to retrieve the
other tool
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wek easily work the puzzle out do we use
the term birdbrain to refer to people
they think are particularly stupid I
think that our work New Caledonian crows
and other people's work with a whole
range of different bird species shows
that this is completely under estimating
their abilities and in fact there's no
reason to believe that birds as a whole
are any less intelligent mammals
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you