A crow bent a piece of wire into a hook to solve a puzzle no one taught her

In 2002, researchers studying New Caledonian crows watched one named Betty spontaneously bend a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube — a tool she had never seen and was never trained to make. Wild members of her species independently craft hooked twigs to fish grubs out of bark, one of the clearest cases of tool manufacture outside primates.

— Alex Weir, Jackie Chappell & Alex Kacelnik, Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows — Science, 2002