It wouldn't win any beauty contest and its raucous caw is hardly easy on the ear.But when it comes to brains, the great British rook stands alone.
In tests, four of the birds displayed the astonishing ability to devise tools to achieve a task.
They were presented with a small bucket of wriggling worms out of reach at the end of a tube, and next to it a piece of straight wire. Remarkably, despite never having seen the set-up before, they immediately got to work bending the wire so they could hook out the bucket and tuck in.
Researchers at Cambridge University believe this proves the birds have a sophisticated intelligence to rival that of chimpanzees, one of man's closest animal cousins, which can craft tools with their hands.
Although New Caledonian crows, from the South Pacific, use sticks to extract grubs from the ground, this is the first time rooks have ever been seen making and using tools, according to a paper published yesterday.
Unlike most animals which learn tricks through trial and error, they solved the problem immediately and, since they were raised in captivity, had no other birds to show them how to do it.The aptly-named Christopher Bird, a PhD student and lead author of the study, said it has long been known that rooks are intelligent but it had not been proven as they have no need to make tools in the wild, unlike their New Caledonian cousins.'They tend to use their intelligence on other tasks such as complex nest building because they are not faced with a shortage of food.'Mr Bird and colleagues from Queen Mary, University of London, conducted the study with five-year- old rooks Cook, Connelly, Fry and Monroe, which were hand-reared from fledglings.Three of the four rooks made the wire hook on their first attempt. The fourth, Monroe, did it on her fourth attempt.
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Last updated at 1:10 AM on 27th May 2009
