Clever Crows Have an Eye for Tool Use

Today’s comic comes to you via the journal Current Biology, where researchers tested New Caledonian crows and their tool-using preferences. The study also suggests that the birds’ extreme binocular vision and wide field of view actually helps them in tool use.

“Binocular vision is often connected to allowing the brain to compare the images seen by each eye, inferring properties of the scene from the differences between these images,” study author Antone Martinho, also at the University of Oxford, explains. “We thought that their binocular fields would facilitate binocular vision, perhaps allowing the birds to judge the distance from tool tip to target. It turned out that, most frequently, they only see the tool tip and target with one eye at a time.”

For more examples of how awesome crows are, check out some of my older comics, Clever Corvus and Caw-sal Reasoning