Clever animals make use of humans

In younger days, I was a milkman in Island Bay (with a horse and cart). Back at the Municipal Milk Department depot in central Wellington, a dapper old gent manned the telephone every morning to hear complaints from householders. He told me that he often got complaints about hedgehogs knocking down milk bottles left at customers’ gates, and biting into the aluminium foil tops to drink the spilt milk.

Early one morning I caught a hedgehog in the act myself.

At the time, international ornithological journals carried many stories about blue tits that had learned to open milk bottles all over Britain.

Thinking that our hedgehogs might interest the Brits, I wrote a letter to the New Scientist, telling them that I had seen a hedgehog lapping up milk from a spilt bottle, in flagrante delicto (‘‘in flagrant delectation’’).

The only response I got was from a Latin scholar who thought I should have written in flagrante delacto.

Stories of clever city animals abound.

We hear about those clever Japanese crows that wait for traffic lights to go green before depositing walnuts on pedestrian crossings, and skipping back to the footpath before cars crush the nuts.

There are pigeons that spend virtually all their days hopping on and off trains at different London underground stations.

Barbados bullfinches tear open sachets of sugar and milk whiteners at posh clubs.

We have some pretty smart city sparrows here. In the 1990s, I watched one buzz a glass autodoor into the foyer of the Hutt Art Gallery and Museum.

Then he buzzed another autodoor into the cafe, where the waitresses knew him as Nigel.

Nigel continued scavenging for crumbs and robbing the sugar containers there over a period of four years.

A colleague and I discovered sparrows similarly opening autodoors at 10 other sites – supermarkets, malls, bus shelters, factory tearooms, etc – between Auckland and Dunedin.

As we could find no account of sparrows behaving similarly in the international bird journals, we supposed that New Zealand must boast the smartest sparrows in the world.