Social learning in ravens

Crows and their relatives, such as ravens (Corvus corax), have a reputation for being among the cleverest of birds, but is this reputation justified? Given that it is impossible to get into the minds of crows, to what extent does their ability to learn depend on sophisticated cognitive processes which we might associate with learning in humans?

Johannes Fritz and Kurt Kotrschal of the University of Vienna, Austria tackle this difficult problem in an ingenious experiment in which hand-reared ravens are trained to perform a task - opening a box to obtain a reward - and are then asked to train other ravens to do the same. Their report appears in the April issue of Animal Behaviour. The results are not completely conclusive: although ravens prove to be good teachers, and ravens appear to learn how to open the boxes by observing other ravens, it is hard to know whether ravens learn by imitation or by some less sophisticated mechanism.

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