Cockatoo ‘can make its own tools’

A cockatoo from a species not known to use tools in the wild has been observed spontaneously making and using tools for reaching food and other objects.

A Goffin’s cockatoo called ‘Figaro’, that has been reared in captivity and lives near Vienna, used his powerful beak to cut long splinters out of wooden beams in its aviary, or twigs out of a branch, to reach and rake in objects out of its reach.

Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Vienna filmed Figaro making and using these tools. How the bird discovered how to make and use tools is unclear but shows how much we still don’t understand about the evolution of innovative behaviour and intelligence.

A report of the research is published this week in Current Biology.

New Study Reveals How Humans Became Right-Handed

According to a new study led by Dr Gillian Forrester of the University of Sussex, a predominance to be right-handed is not a uniquely human trait but one shared by great apes.

The study, published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research, analyzed hand actions directed towards either objects or individuals in chimpanzees, gorillas and children, and found that all three species are right-handed for actions to objects, but not for actions directed to individuals.

The results support a theory that human right-handedness is a trait developed through tool use that was inherited from an ancestor common to both humans and great apes. The findings challenge a widely held view that right-handed dominance in humans was a species-unique trait linked to the emergence of language.

“Humans have been tool users for 2.5 million years, while the current view is that language only emerged one hundred thousand years ago,” Dr Forrester said. “Our findings provide the first non-invasive results from naturalistic behavior, suggesting that language emerged as a consequence of left hemisphere brain regions that were already evolved to process regular sequences of actions. The structure found in language may have developed from pre-existing brain processes adapted from experience with tool-use.”

Why clever crow is no bird brain

Corvus moneduloides, a native of France’s South Pacific territory of New Caledonia, is one of the stars of the avian world.

It uses its beak to craft complex tools from sticks, leaves and other material and then inserts them into deadwood or vegetation to fish out insects and other food.

Researchers led by Jolyon Troscianko of the University of Birmingham in central England used an ophthalmoscope video camera to record field of view and eye movement as three wild-caught birds examined a baited tube.

The bird’s eyes are more forward-positioned, rather than sideways-positioned, which gives it exceptional “binocular overlap,” they found.

This is the area that is viewed by both eyeballs, and is important because it helps the brain judge the distance of nearby objects.

In New Caledonian crows, the binocular overlap is 61.5 degrees, which is at least 23.9 degrees greater than in non-tool-using species of crow that the researchers also examined.

Added to this is the crow’s unusually straight bill, the investigators found.

With it, the bird can get a firm grip on a tool and bring its tip into its field of binocular vision.

"These features enable a degree of tool control that would be impossible in other corvids [crows], despite their comparative cognitive abilities," says the study, published by the journal Nature Communications.

Dolphins, elephants and other birds are among non-primates that have been found to use tools. But the New Caledonian crow occupies a privileged place because its features are so specifically adapted for tools, says the study.