People have found some clever uses for cars over the years, like roving power supplies, homes on wheels and even sophisticated ice cream makers. Now, an ingenious murder of crows has found a new use for the humble automobile: rolling nut crackers.
That’s right, birds in Japan have been witnessed dropping walnuts onto the country’s roads in order to see them smashed open by cars passing by. The wild behavior was captured by a lovely old BBC nature documentary, which followed the crows finessing their techniques.
In the footage, crows are seen dropping walnuts onto the highway before they’re crushed open by passing cars. However, I hear you ask, how do they collect their crumpled nuts from the road without getting struck down in their prime?
Well, these clever little creatures found a place where cars weren’t always thundering through: pedestrian crossings. As Sir David Attenborough explains in his soothing voice, “some birds have refined their technique: they station themselves beside pedestrian crossings.”
Once next to a suitable crossing, the birds drop their nuts on the crossing while the traffic is moving, watch them get cracked open and then wait for a red light to stop the flow of cars. When that happens, they then swoop down and collect all their chunks of nuts and scoff them down in safety. How clever is that?
The nut might be sashed to smithereens and be better used in granola or some kind of cake, but it still looks a damn site easier than using some ancient nutcracker whenever you need a snack.
If you want to watch a murder of crows follow traffic signals in a way that many American drivers never dream of, the whole clip from the BBC is linked above.