The real crow girl

The news articles about the tool-making crow yesterday absolutely fascinated me, so today I went to the official site of the Behavioral Ecology Research Group at Oxford University in the U.K.

The video clip shows the female crow, Betty, attempting to get a piece of food that has been put in a small metal bucket that was, in turn, put down inside a clear plexiglass tube sitting in a box--too far down for her to reach with her beak. She has a straight piece of wire (the two crows were given both a straight wire and a curved wire, but the curved wire was appropriated by the other, male, crow) which she tries to use to fish out the food with no success.

You can practically see the lightbulb go on over her head as she pulls the wire out of the tube and, bracing it against the box and holding it with her foot, uses her beak to bend the end of the wire into a hook. She then runs over and sticks her new tool down into the tube, hooks the curved end through the bucket's handle, and pulls the bucket out of the tube.

It made me exclaim out loud when I saw it, it made me incredibly happy. No one else that I showed it to was quite as excited about it as I was; Bob's first thought was that the crow was trained. Trained or not (and I don't think she was), it's still amazing, I think.

Think of how tiny a bird's brain is (hence, "birdbrain"). But who's to say that their brain has to work the same way ours does? I think about it the same way I think about alien races--if they do exist, how can we imagine that we could actually communicate with them at all, why do we think that their brains, or whatever they have that performs a corresponding function, would work anything like ours do?

Dinah appears to be a very smart cat, as cats go. She figures things out. She has one of those round toys with a track that a golfball-sized-ball fits into; she will lie on her side next to it and bat the ball around the track, then stop it with her paw and send it barrelling back the opposite direction. She's figured out how to open doors (Pyewacket, lovable though she is, isn't nearly as quick--she waits to have Dinah open the doors) and drawers--the latter in her quest to find the much-desired rubber bands that we hide from her.

I watch her sitting on the sink in the mornings while I get ready for work; I sometimes turn the faucet on so it drips, and she'll catch a drop in her paw, then lick it off, or she'll put her head under the faucet and drink directly from the stream of water. Then she'll sit there with her head cocked, trying to figure it out.

I discovered a new mystery series a few weeks ago. I picked up a paperback by Perri O'Shaughnessy--Writ of Execution, at that time the newest one of seven. Since then I've requested the rest of them from the library, and have been working my way through them, although not in the correct order. I decided not to try to do that, since I was getting them from the library rather than buying them--I couldn't wait until I could accumulate the whole set, and I didn't want to just request the first one, wait until it arrived, read it, then request the next one, etc. My lack of patience is legendary.

The books are about a female lawyer in Lake Tahoe, Nevada--ski resorts and casinos play a big part, as well as courtroom scenes. They're written by two sisters, Pamela (a lawyer) and Mary (the writer)--"Perri."

It's always exciting to find an as-yet-undiscovered (by me) series. I've read three, I'm currently reading the fourth, and there are two waiting at the library for me. Another old one is on request, plus there's a new one out any time now. Exciting!

I'm actually sort of glad I'm reading them out of order. Several very traumatic things happen throughout the course of the books, and since I read the newest one first, I already know they're going to happen, so while there's some nervousness waiting for what I know is coming up, it's not quite as much of a shock as it might be. I suppose that sort of defeats the purpose of a mystery/thriller, but I don't mind. I don't really read for the denouement, I read for the pleasure of the story. In most cases it doesn't bother me to know the ending before I start out.

Well, I don't want to know the ending, per se, i.e., I don't want to know who the villain is, but I do want to know whether all the main characters survive--I really hate it when I get involved with a character and they're killed off. I never read the end of a book (Bob does that, I never have), but if I get worried about a character (or an animal, I admit it) maybe not making it, I've been known to flip to the last few pages of a book, and kind of squint my eyes, and just see if the character I'm worried about appears, speaking, perhaps. Then I can finish the book in peace.

Actually, the whole "reading the last one first" thing is something I do all the time. If I run across a new series that I haven't read before, I'll almost always pick the newest book to read first. My theory is that the newest book will be the best-written (not always the case, I'm sure, but there it is), and if I like it, I can go back and read them all, starting with the first one. That way I'm not writing off a whole series that I might enjoy by reading one that turns me off the author. A bad technique, probably, but it's mine.