By the end of 2019, surveys showed the behavior had spread to 44 suburbs. The first survey, in 2018, confirmed people in three southern suburbs had noticed the birds prying open their trash bins with their beaks and claws. She and her team launched an online survey in the greater Sydney and Wollongong areas, asking people whether their resident cockatoos could open bins. (Read about the emerging science around bird intelligence.) “The interesting part was the resource is everywhere, the birds are everywhere, but we didn’t see the behavior everywhere,” Klump says. In the mid-2010s, scientists started hearing about cockatoos opening trash cans in Sydney’s southern suburbs. “I like to call parrots the most human of birds,” he says, “and this is more evidence in that direction.” Predictable pattern of cockatoo learning Still, Wright says, the research furthers our understanding of parrots as highly intelligent beings. People who study parrots aren’t necessarily surprised by the social-learning discovery, says Timothy Wright, a New Mexico State University biologist who studies vocal learning in parrots and wasn’t involved in the study. But they’re often regarded as pests in those settings due to their destructive habits, such as chewing on balconies. Unlike most of the 350 known parrot species, the sulphur-crested cockatoo is flourishing, particularly in urban environments. These handsome, two-foot-tall white parrots with vibrant yellow head crests are native to eastern Australia and nearby Pacific islands. For one thing, in a wild landscape it’s difficult to account for all the factors that might be influencing birds’ actions.īut because Sydney’s sulfur-crested cockatoos reliably frequent the same garbage bins, that provided an ideal study setup for Klump to observe these cheeky “urban explorers,” she says. Part of the reason for that lack of evidence is that while parrots in captivity are well studied- think Alex the African gray parrot, who had the intelligence of a three-year-old-it’s harder to observe cultural behavior in wild parrots. ( Read about the hidden world of whale culture. “You would expect parrots also tick all these boxes, but we didn’t have evidence for it”-until now, says Klump, a National Geographic Explorer who is on staff at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Other social species with long lives and big brains, such as crows, great apes, and cetaceans, practice such so-called foraging culture-for instance, chimps show each other new ways to open nuts. This discovery means that parrots “have joined the club of animals that show culture,” says behavioral ecologist Barbara Klump, leader of the study that appears this week in the journal Science. In Sydney, Australia, some sulfur-crested cockatoos-a noisy, gregarious bird that’s common in eastern Australian cities-have figured out how to open garbage bins, a behavior that other cockatoos quickly copied, allowing them to exploit a new food resource. Now, research shows that these large-brained birds can also learn new behaviors from each other, which only decades ago was thought to be a uniquely human trait. Parrots can mimic human speech, move in time to music, and even help others in need.
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