Use of an abusive epithet like "bird brain" is an injustice against avian species, certainly so as respects New Caledonian crows; their brains afford them ability to make tools they can use in solving a problem that confronts them, as when food remains out of any immediate reach afforded them merely by their extending their beaks and talons toward the food. What kind of tool can they make for securing food out of their reach? They can use the product of their own compound tool manufacture! See below. (All bolding of text below is by me (Al Kidd) for sake of emphasis.)
"An international team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and the University of Oxford have revealed that New Caledonian crows are able to create tools by combining two or more otherwise non-functional elements, an ability so far observed only in humans and great apes.
"The new study shows that these birds can create long-reaching tools out of short combinable parts -- an astonishing mental feat. Assemblage of different components into novel functional and maneuverable tools has, until now, only been observed in apes, and anthropologists regard early human compound tool manufacture as a significant step in brain evolution. [Apparently wrongfully so regarded by evolutionists! A truly parsimonious explanation is that the creature's abilities were determined by the Creator, not by purposeless, non-teleological, random mutations in a creature's genome. (The bracketed excursus here is mine, Al Kidd's.)] Children take several years before creating novel tools, probably because it requires anticipating properties of yet unseen objects. Such anticipation, or planning, is usually interpreted as involving creative mental modeling and executive functions.
"The study demonstrates that this species of crow possess highly flexible abilities that allow them to solve complex problems involving anticipation of the properties of objects they have never seen. 'The finding is remarkable because the crows received no assistance or training in making these combinations, they figured it out by themselves,' says Auguste von Bayern, first author of the study from the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology and University of Oxford."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/…/10/181024112201.htm…
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-33458-z
[Second bracketed Excursus by me (Al Kidd): Evolutionists have the mathematically untenable -- hence unreasonable and unscientific -- and naive hypothesis that compound tool manufacture in the New Caledonian crows is co-evolution at work. Their claim is just so much word salad, word magic. This crow's ability under review here is result of the properties of agency that the Creator put into its brain; yes, for the crow's brain to ground "creative mental modeling and executive functions." The crow's brain did not come by its compound-tool manufacturing ability through blind, random mutations in some supposed genome belonging to a creature from which the crow supposedly evolved. And what? Supposedly the ability for compound-tool manufacture co-evolved through species supposedly ancestral to humans, but not even then with the depth of the crow's ability when it supposedly reappeared in primates supposedly ancestral both to humans and chimpanzees?! Clearly, the properties that are inherently present in an animal's brain are not necessarily predictably ensconced within a hierarchical taxonomy that supposedly lays out some progressively ascending pathway in an evolution of species when there is display of more complex cognitive functions than was so for alleged ancestral species. It all depended upon the Creator's good pleasure as respects what He did or did not do when He was creating a set of inheritable properties that informs the brains in the specially created, original exemplars/progenitors of some genus.]
