Is it normal behaviour for rooks to bury bread rather than eat it?

Thanks to Clayton’s own eclectic tastes, which span consciousness to choreography (her other love, besides birds, is dance), the lab also engenders a curious synthesis of ideas drawn from both science and the arts. The rook (Corvus frugilegus) is a member of the family Corvidae in the passerine order of birds. It is found in the Palearctic, its range extending from Scandinavia and western Europe to eastern Siberia. It is a large, gregarious, black-feathered bird, distinguished from similar species by the whitish featherless area on the face. Rooks nest collectively in the tops of tall trees, often close to farms or villages, the groups of nests being known as rookeries.

In winter, keep your eyes peeled for flocks flying above woodland as they come in to roost. Scientists at the University of Cambridge tested the rooks, which are Eurasian members of the crow family, by placing dishes of food on a platform out of reach of a bird enclosure. A single string looped from the enclosure to the platform and back again. Moving the platform closer required pulling on both ends of the string simultaneously, a feat that is only possible if two birds work together, each tugging on one end.

Only this time the venue is the Comparative Cognition Laboratory in Madingley, Cambridge, and the ball is a waxworm. Leo – poised, pointy, determined – is perched on a wooden platform eager to place his bet. A wriggling morsel is laid under one of three cups, the cups shuffled. He snatches the waxworm in his beak and retreats to enjoy his prize. Aristotle, a fellow resident donned in a glossy black feather coat, who has been at the aviary almost as long as the lab itself, looks on knowingly. Rooks are communal breeders, nesting in colonies known as rookeries.

If anyone is equipped to bring these ideas into the public consciousness, it’s Clayton. She has always had a knack for creating tantalising work – for nurturing a creative frisson around different ideas, approaches and perspectives. Rooks are often seen feeding alongside jackdaws, a smaller member of the crow family. Typically, three to four eggs will be laid in spring, hatching after around two weeks. Chicks will stay in the nest for just over a month before fledging. Questions should be scientific enquiries about everyday phenomena, and both questions and answers should be concise.

Last year, a study led by Elias Garcia-Pelegrin used magicians’ sleight of hand as a means to test the perceptual abilities of jays. You don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist or an expert in animal cognition to find these experiments alluring. After a day foraging in the fields, rooks head to the trees en masse; a noisy congregation settling down for a good night’s sleep among the branches. Rooks, compared to other corvids, are tolerant of other species feeding with them, especially Jackdaws. However, Rooks are large birds that can dominate smaller birds and sometimes displace (take the place) other birds at a bird table. Rooks are one of the most social crows, forming very large flocks.

But Rooks also form life-long partnerships, called pairbonds. Rook pairs spend a lot of time close together, feeding one another, displaying and vocalising together and preening. They also act at the same time, one copying the other’s movements. We wanted to know if Rooks were interacting in pairs and groups, and whether they were aggressive to each other.

One of the big questions for her concerned “mental time travel” – the ability to remember the past or plan for the future. “People assumed this is something that only humans have,” she says. But, at Madingley, she observed that jays were also capable of thinking about the future.

Offspring are produced in more than one group (litters, clutches, etc.) and across multiple seasons (or other periods hospitable to reproduction). Iteroparous animals must, by definition, survive over multiple seasons (or periodic condition changes). Record the comings and goings of key feathered friends and help scientists track the effects of climate change on wildlife. Widespread and numerous, rooks are not of conservation concern. However, a moderate decline in their numbers has been recorded since 1995. Rooks are intelligent and have demonstrated the ability to use tools and solve problems.

It added that it would be “delighted” to work with an external funder to keep the aviaries open, should one emerge in the next few months. It is hard to put a precise figure on what it would cost to keep the lab open in the long run, but Clayton estimates it could cost £300,000 to £500,000 to secure the birds for another five or six years. She has received some partial offers from potential donors, though nothing has been confirmed. All corvids are noisy birds, who vocalize to tell others about the location and quality of food, the membership of a pairbond, warning about predators and possibly even their name. We wanted to know what vocalizations were occurring and whether they accompanied visual displays.

Crows, rooks and ravens are all part of the crow family and can be tricky to identify. Further investigation, however, revealed that the rooks may not have as sophisticated an understanding of the task as apes seem to have. Previous research has shown that once a chimp learns it needs a partner to move the platform, it will no longer attempt the task if it is alone.

We reserve the right to edit items for clarity and style. Please include a postal address, daytime telephone number and email address. A grassland with scattered trees or scattered clumps of trees, a type of community intermediate between grassland and forest. For example, What do animals eat in the rainforest light reflected off of water has waves vibrating horizontally. Some animals, such as bees, can detect which way light is polarized and use that information. Reproduction in which eggs are released by the female; development of offspring occurs outside the mother’s body.

An open letter signed by 358 academics from around the world has called on the university to reconsider. One signatory, Alex Thornton, a professor of cognitive evolution at Exeter University, said it would represent an act of “scientific vandalism and monumental self-sabotage”. Emery told me that creating something similar somewhere else would be pretty difficult, “if not impossible”, and incredibly expensive. “These birds cannot be purchased ‘off the shelf’,” he said. “If Nicky’s corvid lab closes down, then it couldn’t really start up again.” As the letter states, the lab at Madingley is the only one of its kind in the UK, and remains “globally unique in its size and capability”. “Magic reveals a lot about the blind spots we have,” says Clayton, and lately magic has opened up a new line of inquiry for the lab.

They are slightly smaller than crows, with a typical wingspan of 90cm. The species’ key identifying feature is the grey-white skin at the base of its long, pointed beak. This distinguishes it from the similar-looking carrion crow, which has an all-black beak. Chimpanzees, and possibly a few other primates, are the only other species that have proved themselves capable of the same task. Rooks are extremely social birds, living in colonies of hundreds of members, and are likely to have faced evolutionary pressure to learn to cooperate, Seed says. As news that the lab faces closure has rippled through the scientific community, the reaction has been of sadness and dismay.

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at /us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. The rooks would swoop, grab a slice of toast, tear it into pieces and bury it.

The rooks in Seed’s lab, on the other hand, kept trying (and failing) to move the platform alone, even after successfully obtaining the food with a partner. Rooks and other corvids, such as crows and ravens, are extremely clever, with intellectual abilities on a par with those of chimpanzees. Animals that use metabolically generated heat to regulate body temperature independently of ambient temperature. Endothermy is a synapomorphy of the Mammalia, although it may have arisen in a (now extinct) synapsid ancestor; the fossil record does not distinguish these possibilities. Young are born in a relatively underdeveloped state; they are unable to feed or care for themselves or locomote independently for a period of time after birth/hatching.

What makes them different from other species of bird is that they can imagine the future and plan for it. They have self-control, too, and can think what they will benefit from later, compared with right now. It is common corvid behaviour to cache food, and one species, the California scrub jay, can act deceptively if another bird is watching it bury food and pretend to move its cache to a new place.

It comes back after 20 minutes or so to retrieve and eat it, once soft. I am sure the rook described in the question – a fellow corvid – is doing a similar thing. No doubt the moisture in the earth softens the bread too. Referring to an animal that lives in trees; tree-climbing.