Abstract
‘Betty’ the New Caledonian crow astonished the world when she ‘spontaneously’ bent straight pieces of garden wire into hooked foraging tools. Recent field experiments have revealed that tool bending is part of the species' natural behavioural repertoire, providing important context for interpreting Betty's iconic wire-bending feat. More generally, this discovery provides a compelling illustration of how natural history observations can inform laboratory-based research into the cognitive capacities of non-human animals.
Highlights
Recent field experiments have revealed that tool bending is part of the species’ natural behavioural repertoire, providing important context for interpreting Betty’s iconic wire-bending feat
The paper that described these observations shook the field of comparative cognition, and quickly became a textbook example of ‘animal intelligence’
We have recently discovered that tool bending is part of New Caledonian crows’ natural behavioural repertoire [4], providing crucial context for this iconic experiment
Summary
Recent field experiments have revealed that tool bending is part of the species’ natural behavioural repertoire, providing important context for interpreting Betty’s iconic wire-bending feat. In 2002, a captive New Caledonian crow Corvus moneduloides— named Betty—bent straight pieces of garden wire into hooked tools, which she subsequently used for lifting a small food-baited bucket from a plastic well (figure 1a; electronic supplementary material, movie S1, Scene 1; [1]).
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