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Feather cam finds bird enterprise

WASHINGTON: Mounting tiny video cameras to the tail feathers of crows, researchers have discovered the birds use a variety of tools to seek food, and even make their own tools, plucking, smoothing and bending twigs and grass.

“We observed a new mode of tool use that was not known before. We saw them use tools on the ground, using a little grass stem to poke and fish into nests,” researcher Christian Rutz of the University of Oxford said.

New Caledonian crows had been known to use sticks to probe rotting trees for grubs, but they were never seen to use tools on the ground before. “The ecological niche they exploit with tools is larger than had been thought,” Mr. Rutz said of the findings, published in the online edition of Science.

The research team studies New Caledonian crows in the laboratory where they have been known to bend wires into tools to retrieve food. They wanted to see whether the crows have similar behaviour in the wild. But it is hard to observe the birds on the Pacific island of New Caledonia both because of the heavy forests and the birds’ sensitivity to the presence of people.

So they came up with the idea of feather-cam, a 13-gram video camera they tested on lab crows and then took to the forest. A gram is about the weight of a paper clip. The camera is attached to the tail feathers of the crow and bends forward to record the belly, feet and sometimes the head of the bird. — AP

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