The common or garden RAVEN!
According to an article recently published on www.livescience.com,
"Ravens use their beaks and wings much like humans rely on our hands to make gestures, such as for pointing to an object..
This is the first time researchers have seen gestures used in this way in the wild by animals other than primates.
From the age of 9 to 12 months, human infants often use gestures to direct the attention of adults to objects, or to hold up items so that others can take them. These gestures, produced before children speak their first words, are seen as milestones in the development of human speech.
Dogs and other animals are known to point out items using gestures, but humans trained these animals, and scientists had suggested the natural development of these gestures was normally confined only to primates.
Even then, comparable gestures are rarely seen in the wild in our closest living relatives, the great apes — for instance, chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda employ so-called directed scratches to indicate distinct spots on their bodies they want groomed."
Ravens and their relatives such as crows and magpies have been found to be remarkably intelligent over the years, surpassing most other birds in terms of smarts and even rivaling great apes on some tests.
Find out more by reading the full article here.
(Image source: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birding/common-raven/)
