Mondo Knows Facts
New Caledonian crows bend twigs into hooks
They carve tools from shrubs and keep good ones for later use Birds in the wild shape sticks with their beaks to hook grubs out of wood. In experiments they solve multi step problems for food, including choosing the right shaped tool. Juvenile birds take years to perfect the technique. It sits in Mondo's animals collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
New Caledonian crows craft and use compound tools in the wildCrows fashion hooked twigs and barbed leaves to extract grubs from wood.Chimpanzees fish for termites with prepared sticksThey select, trim and sometimes bend a twig before inserting itBirds sense Earth's magnetic field to find their wayA light sensitive protein in the eye may let them see the fieldSome birds raise another species' chickCuckoo chicks hatch first and push the host's eggs or young out of the nestCalifornia condors came back from 22 birdsThe last wild birds were taken into captivity in the 1980s and the species now numbers hundredsMany bird bones are hollow and struttedInternal braces keep them stiff while saving weight for flight
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Tags: birds, tools, intelligence
New Caledonian crows bend twigs into hooks: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- They carve tools from shrubs and keep good ones for later use. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a animals fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Animals shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.