Documenting novel cases of tool use in wild animals can inform our understanding of the evolutionary drivers of the behavior's emergence in the natural world. We describe a previously unknown tool-use behavior for wild birds, so far only documented in the wild in primates and elephants. We observed 2 Atlantic puffins at their breeding colonies, one in Wales and the other in Iceland (the latter captured on camera), spontaneously using a small wooden stick to scratch their bodies. The importance of these observations is 3-fold. First, while to date only a single form of body-care-related tool use has been recorded in wild birds (anting), our finding shows that the wild avian tool-use repertoire is wider than previously thought and extends to contexts other than food extraction. Second, we expand the taxonomic breadth of tool use to include another group of birds, seabirds, and a different suborder (Lari). Third, our independent observations span a distance of more than 1,700 km, suggesting that occasional tool use may be widespread in this group, and that seabirds' physical cognition may have been underestimated.

中文翻译：

---

海鸟工具使用的证据。

记录在野生动物中使用工具的新案例可以帮助我们了解该行为在自然界中的出现的进化驱动因素。我们描述了野生鸟类以前未知的工具使用行为，到目前为止，只有野生动物中的灵长类和大象才有记载。我们在繁殖地观察到2只大西洋海雀，一个在威尔士，另一个在冰岛（后者是用相机拍摄的），它们是用小木棍自发地抓挠它们的身体的。这些观察的重要性是三倍。首先，虽然迄今为止在野鸟（蚂蚁）中只记录了一种与身体护理相关的工具使用形式，但我们的发现表明，野生禽类工具使用的范围比以前想象的要广，并扩展到了食物以外的其他环境中萃取。第二，我们扩展了工具使用的分类学广度，以包括另一组鸟类，海鸟和一个不同的子顺序（Lari）。第三，我们的独立观测距离超过1,700公里，这表明该组中偶尔使用工具的可能性很大，并且海鸟的物理认知可能被低估了。