MONDAY SPECIAL

MONDAY SPECIAL [WORDS] * fable : n. 우화 * beak : 부리 * folk : n. 사람들 * rod : n. 낚싯대 * tug : n. 당김, 끔 * call and effect : * contraption : n. 고안물, 기묘한 장치 * slip : v. 미끄러 뜨리다 * klutzy : v. 꼴불견인, 어리석은 * jam : v. 밀다, 쑤셔넣다 * companion : n. 동료 ========================================================================== Finally from us this Friday evening, seeing is believing. The Greek story teller, Aesop, who is famous for his fables told us in one when a thirsty crow could not get his beak in a jug to drink the water, he dropped stones in the jug until the water rose high enough to drink. We've actually never seen it happen. But we have now seen a crow who is smart enough to fish like a person. Here's ABC's Robert Krulwich. There's a story they tell in cold places about ice fishing. You know, folks who dig holes in the ice and then a drop a line in. But this is not a story about fish. It's about crows. Crows, everybody knows this, are smart. And the story fishermen tell is they go off to a lunch or something and they leave their rod right beside the hole when a crow comes by and sees, well, a tug on the line. So the crow looks around, puts his beak on the line, pulls up the fish, eats the fish, doesn't get hooked, suggesting the crows know about call and effect and up and down, scientists think well, a crow is that smart? And then, they met Betty. A crow captured in New Zealand, and brought to a lab at Oxford University. "Betty come on." Biologists, Jackie Chapple and Alex Wier, one day brought an odd looking contraption into the lab, a glass cylinder with a little lunch bucket you can slip inside. And into that bucket, they put meat. "Crows love meat, and they'll do anything about it." So could Betty take the wire hook resting there and use it to fish out the meat? Well, this crow messing everything up is not Betty; it's her klutzy friend, Able, who now flies off. Here's Betty. She picks up a second wire, that's not a hook. It's straight. That will work. She's going to try. And then jump forward a minute. She's jamming the wire against the tray wall. And look! You see it's bent now. So she drops it in. Success! "All really was nice. I couldn't believe she'd done it." So they tried ten times more. Here, Betty is bending the straight wire by walking and pushing, and nine out of ten times she made a tool that worked. The question now is 'Is Betty a one in a million Einstein crow or could she teach this to a normal crow? She's got 21 new companions. She might be a genius, says Jackie. "But that seems really unlikely. So...we're...we're some fairly confident that if we test a lot of crows in the same technique, that at least some of them will be able to do this." But, so far, Betty's the only one. Robert Krulwich, ABCNEWS. Amazing. That's our report on the broadcast tonight. We're leaving for Baghdad tonight. We will broadcast from there on Monday. I'm Peter Jennings. Hope you have a good evening and a good weekend. Good night.