SMART & STUPID | Who's The Bird Brain?

Do crows think? Are they capable of conscious decision-making? I saw a crow with a dry piece of biscuit in its beak sitting on top of a flower pot the other afternoon. The bird dropped the biscuit in the water that had collected on the pot's holding tray. A little later, the bird was feasting on the softened food! I did not have a video camera to record the intelligent feat.Many others have done that though. Some have even posted them on the Net. In one such video clip, available on the internet, a crow reaches for a morsel of food at the bottom of a tall beaker. Finding a thin iron wire doesn't do the work, the bird forms a hook of the wire and then, pulls out the deep-seated chow. In another clip, also on the Net, to crack a walnut a crow takes it high above a thoroughfare to drop it on the road. But what does the poor crow do when the man-machine traffic is incessant? It waits for the traffic lights to turn red! That's when it hops on the road and picks up the bits and pieces of the nut. Another raven from another video tackles the problem more ingeniously: It drops the nut from an overhanging traffic signal on to a zebra crossing. After the motorists and pedestrians hurry along, flattening the nut in the process, the corvid drops to ground zero and works on the kernel. Such ability to solve problems befuddles onlookers, and has the scientific world such as the ecology group at Oxford University scratching head wondering if bird brain is as intelligent as human brain.
Investigators have already found that like the higher mammals, birds have the ability to recognise themselves in mirror-tests. Besides 'self-recognition', they display 'social intelligence'. One parrot has been known to 'count, identify shapes and colours besides being able to mimic human and other sounds. Such 'intelligence' has long stirred considerable interest among scientists. For people such as cartoonist R K Laxman all this may seem old hat. For long, he has maintained that crows are intelligent. Indian folklore too abounds with examples of this cleverness. But it is only in recent times that scientists are realising that the crow has complex social reasoning skills and an ability to craft ingenious tools. What took us so long to understand this? That begs the question: Do crows think humans are stupid?