The corvid family continues to surprise. The remarkable cognitive abilities of these birds—ravens, crows, jays, and kin—have been well documented. The Clark’s nutcracker, a jaylike bird, stores thousands of pine-nut caches each fall and is able to relocate them under a blanket of winter snow. Ravens use insight rather than trial-and-error to retrieve chunks of salami dangling from strings. New Caledonian crows fashion leaves into tools to probe rotting wood for tasty grubs. Steller’s jays have been observed brandishing pointed sticks as weapons.
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