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.