Chris Packham and his New Caledonian crow Are humans as smart as crows? Once the BBC poses a question like that, you already know the answer. In a new series, However, Telegraph reviewer Anita Singh notes that the first episode “had an air of being cobbled together” with old footage of animals doing amusing tricks. One experiment involved a New Caledonian crow, a species which has acquired a reputation for tool-making amongst biologists. In the wild, it removes grubs and bugs from logs with twigs. Packham set up an experiment in which the bird had to access a treat from a perspex box through a series of manoeuvres. It needed to “push a ball out of the way, withdraw three sticks barring the door, reach inside and pull out the string attached to the food”.