Caledonian Crows Parent Pretty Well Too

A charming article in today's New York Times called "Nurturing Nests Lift These Birds to a Higher Perch" begins:

"Amid all the psychosocial caterwauling these days over the relative merits of tiger mothers and helicopter dads, allow me to make a pitch for the quietly dogged parenting style of the New Caledonian crow.

New Caledonian crows are renowned for their toolmaking skills.

In the complexity, fluidity and sophistication of their tool use, their ability to manipulate and bird-handle sticks, leaves, wires, strings and any other natural or artificial object they can find into the perfect device for fishing out food, or fishing out second-, third- or higher-order tools, the crows have no peers in the nonhuman vivarium, and that includes such textbook dexterous smarties as elephants, macaques and chimpanzees."

It goes on to describe the extended childhood, patient apprenticeship, and indulgent adolescence of young Caledonia crows. Indeed, Caledonia crows seem to share a culture, with local crow populations having standard tool sets that differ from place to place. Not only that, but, unlike other corvids (ravens, crows, and jays), Caledonians form small nuclear family units. Bonded pairs remain together for a year and - interestingly, I think - maintain their pair bond by sharing gifts, snuggling, and grooming each other.

Equally interestingly, as young birds go through their six month apprenticeships going through the difficult struggle to learn how to shape tools, parents model behavior by showing them how to do it successfully, reward attempts by feeding them while they struggle with it, and scaffold behavior by handing them partially built tools for them to finish.

Watch them at it:

• Caledonian crows using tools in the wild.
• Some wonderful footage of a Caledonian crow in a lab forming a hook to snag a bucket from a tube.

Going to YouTube and a fast search of Caledonian Crow will yield a wealth of videos.

Many animals that need to learn complex skills - lions, wolves, and yes, tigers - have extended parent-child contact that show many of the same teaching qualities (modeling and scaffolding) as good parent-child relations in humans. It's interesting seeing these same behaviors in a non-mammalian species when learning the same kind of complex skill set is required.

© 2011 Nancy Darling. All Rights Reserved