Video: Crows Manufacture Technology To Operate Vending Machine

Certain species of crows' abilities to not only use but actually manufacture tools has long fascinated scientists, as well as science and nature enthusiasts. Top of the corvid intelligence chain has long been the New Caledonian crow — birds that, researchers previously found, have heads and beaks that are perfectly designed for superior tool development and implementation.

Not only are birds of this species able to make and use tools, they are able to innovate new tools in response to new challenges. As this rather remarkable video from the BBC shows, these crafty crows are able to use and adapt technology to new and specific situations — in this case to manufacture tokens of an exact size of paper in order to operate a special 'crow vending machine'.

The machine was developed by researcher Dr Sarah Jelbert, from the University of Cambridge, as an intelligence test for wild crows that spend only a few days in a specially designed aviary. The vending machine is specially designed to be unlike anything the crows would have encountered in nature (to prove that they are able to learn how to operate it). After being exposed to how the machine works — deposit the right size piece of paper, get a treat — Dr Jelbert's research showed that more than half of her crow subjects were then spontaneously able to snip larger pieces of paper into the correct-sized tokens needed to generate another treat. Caw, indeed.