The right tool for the job

It’s been a weekend of nature and nurture I think. Well, if you count gardening and a mother and daughter shopping expedition as part of that equation that is. But it has left me pondering this evening about the way in which some animals use tools.

It started off with me buying three strips of turf at the garden centre. Roo had mentioned when she arrived home last weekend that it would be nice to have some grass in the garden for the dog. The dog like grass for various purposes – including sunbathing – but, renovations not withstanding, the back yard is about the size of a shoe box. Nevertheless, I could see that there was a small space into which grass could be introduced and I prepared it the best I could over a couple of hours of shovelling and raking this morning before heading off in the car to buy the turf.

The first strip went down fine. The second needed to be cut to size to fit, but with what, exactly, does one cut a roll of turf? I had no idea so sat down on the stool in the garden in the sunshine with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and thought about it. The spade was too clumsy, the rake and hand trowel inappropriate, I had no saw, and I’m sure if I was a better person I’d have one of those half-moon shaped lawn-edging devices, but I’m not so I haven’t. And then a little beam from the patiently orbiting star ship lateral thinking struck me. I wandered into the kitchen, picked up the long serrated bread knife and set about slicing through the cylinder of turf as if it was a giant Swiss roll but made with soil and grass rather than chocolate sponge and jam. Perfect.

Turfing / Swiss roll cutting completed, I moved on to planting the couple of hundred summer flowering bulbs that have been hanging around for eternity. The bulbs were all rather tiny ugly-looking things, somewhat like brown fossilised iced gems but without the biscuit and with some flaky onion skin type stuff around them. The instructions on the bag said to plant them either 1 or 2 inches deep. This again sent me back to my gardening tool pondering stool; the trowel or spade would not be any good – too wide, too deep – and I haven’t got one of those dibbers or dabbers or whatever they’re called, so what to use? And then, eureka, the second lateral beam of the day sent me back to the kitchen utensil pot to select an alternative garden tool of choice, this time the porridge stirrer (or spurtle to give it its proper Scottish name). In no time, I was poking perfectly sized holes in the soil and dropping in the ugly bulbs at a rate of knots.

There are moments – and I have plenty of them, believe me – when I think how very closely we are related to the other animals that we share the planet with. Chimps and monkeys that use sticks to extract termites, collect honey or to escape from an enclosure, for instance. Or Egyptian vultures that use specially selected stones to break open ostrich eggs. Or woodpecker finches, native to the Galapagos Islands, that use cactus spines to prise ants out of holes. Or green herons that learn to use bait to go fishing. Or the laboratory-dwelling crow that learned to use a cup he’d been given as a toy to fetch water to moisturise his food.

I think next time that I’m planning to do any gardening or having folk round for some grub, I’ll make sure that I invite a variety of birds and a couple of monkeys. After all, if they can do all that with just a mossy old stick or a couple of stones, imagine what they could do with a kitchen full of tools.