There are two species on Earth that uses hook-shaped tools: New Caledonian crows and humans. Now, for the first ever, the birds have been caught on camera while using them.

There are crows across the world, but the crows on New Caledonia, which is a forested island in the South Pacific, are well known for their ability of making and using tools. In other things, they fashion sticks into sharp poking instruments, using them to ‘fish’ for wood-boring larvae that hide in tree trunks or dead wood.

Scientists conducted a new study where they described how they have caught some of the most complex handiwork of crows on video. They did so with the help of particular miniature cameras and 19 avian auteurs. The study was published this week in Biology Letters.

Coauthor of the study, Christian Rutz, a behavioral ecologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said they observed it before and many researchers had noticed it, but none of them was able to capture any videos.

Afterwards, ‘mini spy cams’ particularly fitted for birds came into being. Rutz, then at Oxford, and Jolyon Troscianko, then the University of Birmingham graduate student, created them. The researchers deployed these cameras on 19 wild New Caledonian crows in late 2009, with a hope to document the birds’ strange behavior with hooked stick tools.

Rutz said, “Some people think you need a large brain to use tools. These crows disprove that. They show incredibly complex tool behavior. The big question is: Why and how? What is special about the crows on this island?”