Leo, an 18-year-old rook, is playing mind games. It’s a street-corner classic – cups and balls. 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. Leo cocks his head and takes a stab. Success! 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.
Watching alongside me is Professor Nicola Clayton, a psychologist who founded the lab 22 years ago, and we are joined by Francesca Cornero, 25, a PhD researcher (and occasional cups and balls technician). Clayton, 59, who is short, with blonde hair, large glasses and is wearing loose, black tango trousers, studies the cognitive abilities of both animals and humans, but is particularly known for her seminal research into the intelligence of corvids (birds in the crow family, which includes rooks, jays, magpies and ravens). Corvids have long proved to be at odds with the “bird-brain” stereotype endured by most feathered creatures and her lab, a cluster of four large aviaries tucked behind a thatched pub, has paved the way for new theories about the evolution and development of intelligence. 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.
