avian innovation toolbase:
http://biology.mcgill.ca/faculty/lef...n_database.pdf
and guess what the most innovative bird in that list is? no, not the crow. the freaking house sparrow. that dumb bird that probably didn't even know that a window is not the sky, and keeps ramming itself against the window trying to get out, while making itself a youtube laughingstock.
anyways, i'm sure they did try to do some controls for the relative abundance of birds. the most common birds nailed the most innovations. most innovations were done by carrion crows, magpies, herring gulls, house sparrows, european starlings, peregrine falcons, blackbirds, and a few others.
even the mallard managed to nail down a considerable number of innovations. the MALLARD.
but seriously, most of the rarer birds hardly get any innovations at all. even the new calendonian crow didnt even get an entry.
listing the innovations and leaving them for evaluation is better than counting them equally. seriously. eating vomit (yes, that WAS one of the innovations listed in the actual paper) would otherwise count the same as using cars to crack nuts. (although the latter would fit under a technical innovation and not a food type one)
and they only listed a SINGLE innovation for that most creative of birds: the kea. what???
