Rooks

CNRS-campus Cronenbourg, Strasbourg, France

Christelle Scheid

We established a captive rook colony in the spring of 2006 with chicks born in the wild colony of the CNRS campus Cronenbourg (Strasbourg). The main goal was to create an opportunity for students, notably master students, after the French government limited the masters so severely that internships with my primate projects in Ivory Coast and South-Africa became virtually impossible.

In the first years, during the PhD-study of Christelle Scheid (see below) our possibilities were limited by the size and layout of our old aviary. Christelle therefore did part of her work in Austria, where she also went for training in bird husbandry. The rooks were housed in a new aviary since the spring of 2009.

the old aviary

(photo: C. Scheid)

the new aviary

(photo: R. Noë)

Christelle started with a training period at the Konrad Lorenz Research Center in Grünau, Austria under supervision of Thomas Bugnyar and Kurt Kotrschal, during which she worked on social attention and spatial memory in ravens and jackdaws.

Back in Strasbourg she studied several aspects of cooperation in rooks, such as food sharing and the influence of 'personality' on performance in cooperative tasks.

Christelle's study was supported by a grant of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and by the GEBACO-programme

Publications Christelle Scheid

Scheid, C. & Noë, R. 2010. The performance of rooks in a cooperative task depends on their temperament. Animal Cognition, 13, 545-553. pdf
Scheid, C., Schmidt, J. & Noë, R. 2008. Distinct patterns of food offering and co-feeding in rooks. Animal Behaviour 76, 1701-1707. pdf
Scheid, C. & Bugnyar, T. 2008. Short-term observational spatial memory in jackdaws (Corvus monedula) and ravens (Corvus corax). Animal Cognition 11, 691-69.
Scheid, C., Range, F. & Bugnyar, T. 2007. When, what, and whom to watch? Quantifying attention in ravens (Corvus corax) and jackdaws (Corvus monedula). J Comp Psy 121, 380–386.
Schloegl, C., Schmidt, J., Scheid, C., Kotrschal, K. & Bugnyar., T. 2008. Gaze following in non-human animals: the corvid example. In: Animal Behaviour: New Research (Ed. by Columbus, F.) New York: Nova Science Publishers.

International cooperations

I initiated an international network of corvid researchers COCOR (Cooperation in Corvids), which was one of 5 consortia of the ESF-EUROCORES programme TECT (The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading).

Our rook project was also part of GEBACO (The Genetic Basis of Cooperation), a EU-Framework 6 research programme. Further meetings and exchanges were financed by another Framework 6 programme INCORE (Integrating Cooperation Research across Europe)

last update: 6 OCT 2020