It eats a wide range of food, including many types of invertebrates, eggs, nestlings, small mammals, snails, nuts and seeds.

[3][4][5] As a result of these findings, the New Caledonian crow has become a model species for scientists trying to understand the impact of tool use and manufacture on the evolution of intelligence.

The bird has an all-black appearance with a rich gloss to its feathers of purple, dark blue and some green in good light.

The beak is moderate in size but is unusual in that the tip of the lower mandible is angled upwards, making it somewhat chisel-like in profile.

The New Caledonian crow eats a wide range of food, including many types of insects and other invertebrates (some caught in flight with great agility, including night-flying insects which it catches at dusk), eggs and nestlings, small mammals, snails (which it drops from a height onto hard stones), and various nuts and seeds.

The feeding method of the woodpecker finch differs in that it stabs at grubs and levers them slowly out of the log using a small twig.

This species uses stick tools in the wild by finding small twigs and probing them into holes in logs to extract insects and larvae.

This species has a particular method for crafting tools:Crows snip into the leaf edges and then tear out neat strips of vegetation with which they can probe insect-harboring crevices.

Gavin R. Hunt and colleagues at the University of Auckland studied tools the crows make out of pandanus (or screw pine) leaves.

In 2002, researcher Alex Kacelnik and colleagues at the University of Oxford observed of a couple of New Caledonian crows called Betty and Abel: Betty's toolmaking abilities came to light by accident during an experiment in which she and Abel had to choose between a hooked and a straight wire for retrieving small pieces of pig heart, their favorite food.

These crows also use tools to investigate potentially dangerous objects, such as a rubber snake or a flashing LED bike light.

This complex behaviour involved the crow realising that a tool could be used on non-food objects, and suppressing the urge to go directly for the food.

In a study conducted at the Max Planck Society crows have been shown to create compound tools from 2–4 short branches that could be slotted together.

[15] New Caledonian crows have shown they are able to process information from mirrors, a cognitive ability possessed by only a small number of species.