From hammers and chisels to cars and computers — the technological behaviour of humans is unsurpassed by any other organism. Nevertheless, we are not alone in our technological capacity. Since Jane Goodall’s Jane Goodall's pioneering discovery of chimpanzees' tool manufacturing half a century ago, many other primate and non-primate species are now known to exhibit tool-related behaviour(s). The last 15 years have seen a growing number of studies suggesting birds, particularly corvids and parrots, perform comparably to primates on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. One species in particular, the New Caledonian crow, has convergently evolved tool manufacture skills that rival those seen in chimpanzees. They are also the only species besides humans that produce hook tools. New Caledonian crows’ pandanus leaf tool designs vary across populations in different geographical areas in a pattern that suggests they have cumulatively evolved. In aviary experiments, wild-caught New Caledonian crows have successfully solved tasks that require sophisticated cognitive abilities such as reasoning by exclusion, causal inference, meta-tool use, agency detection and short-term planning. New Caledonian crows are thus an ideal model species to test hypotheses about what makes humans unique and, in the process, study the more general evolutionary links between tool manufacture, cognition and cultural evolution.