Making Monkeys Out of Scientists

Crows are known to have a sense of humour - a Trickster sense of humour at times, but hey. So at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, scientists are again messing with the crows, and may come to regret it.

Apart from demonstrating yet again that our Corvid cousins are highly intelligent - something any Pagan knows well - the experimenters have been left a little puzzled as to why not all the crows in their study demonstrated the same level of nous. Three of the crows failed the tasks outright. The team plans to find out why, and are doubtless busy designing more fiendish food traps to that end.

I could tell you, and so probably could many readers of this blog.
I'm betting that there are three crows at the University of Auckland who are hosing themselves laughing at the foolish human scientists, and who are planning more jokes along the same lines.

Don't be surprised if the next paper this New Zealand team publishes is along the lines of a discussion of the errors inherent in 'studying' corvids.

Maybe if they cut out saying things like this:

"They seem to have some kind of concept of a hole that isn't tied to purely visual features, and they can use this concept to figure out the novel problem," Taylor says. "This is the most conclusive evidence to date for causal reasoning in an animal."

the crows would respect them a bit more.

Pic: Found in the company of Odin the AllFather, who apparently has a MySpace page