We caught the tail end of a PBS show tonight about smart crows solving a puzzle that required them to pull up a string, extract a short stick tied to its end, use the short stick to get a longer stick from behind some bars, and use the long stick to remove a treat from the end of a tube. Unfortunately I can't find that clip on YouTube, but here's something similar in one of those great TED talks. The crows do several tricks, of which one of the best is early on. If the narrator is serious (and correct) that the crow doing that trick really figured out that trick with the wire for himself, I'm impressed.
Smart critters. They readily teach their tricks to other crows, which means they have something like a transmissible culture, as humans do.
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