Aesop's fables are actually true?

[SUBMAN1]

Noooooooo! I know crows are smart, but this is over the top!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090806/ap_on_sc/us_sci_aesop_s_crows

-S

PS. More crow trickery revealed:
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/

[SteamWake]

Yea I saw this yesterday pretty interesting.

Somehow though I think it may at some point be conditioned behaviour. How often would a bird have to do this task in the wild?

Still its fascinating to see a fable come to life. ;)

[NeonSamurai]

Here is another trick of theirs. They have been known to use traffic lights to open nuts and the like by dropping the nut on the crosswalk where car tires go, then waiting for a car to run it over, and they then further wait until there is a red light before going to fetch their cracked nut.

Here is a similar video of it (though this bird is using a regular intersection). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0
Couldn't find the vid i was thinking of though.

[Oberon]

Corvids are very smart buggers. :yep:

"The brain-to-body weight ratios of corvid brains are among the largest in birds, equal to that of great apes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape) and cetaceans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean), and only slightly lower than a human"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae#Intelligence

[Sailor Steve]

Pretty amazing stuff!