Shredding Crow

To quote a friend of mine, "this bird can board better than I can." (thx AG)

From The Atlantic...

I wanted to know if there was a greater significance to this video and this amazing bird. So, I called up Alan Kamil, who has been studying corvids for decades and is co-director of the Center for Avian Intelligence at the University of Nebraska. I've got to send you this YouTube clip of this crow sledding down a roof in Russia, I told him.

Across the phone line, I heard Kamil gamely open his email and begin to watch the video. Like most people who watch the video, he chuckled and said, "Wow, this is cool," a proposition to which I assented.

Then I started my questioning. What can we learn from this YouTube video? How can we explain this bird's behavior? Is there some natural analog to this in the wild? Was there some kind of greater lesson here about the evolutionary process or how crows use play?