So cockatoos adapt to the humans, who then adapt to the cockatoos, who then adapt once again, and so on. "And it's a different culture because birds that are in the same social group have a similar behavioral method of opening a bin, whereas birds that are further apart are more different in their opening style." " may sound trivial, but when you put these together, it is a different way of opening a bin that demonstrates that is a different behavior," he says. Major says this is a demonstration that the birds are learning from each other, creating their own subcultures. The differences were small - opening the bins with their feet versus their beaks, opening the left side or the right, walking the lid back via shuffled feet or one foot in front of the other - but consistent. "I was like the crazy bird lady and no one told me.People were talking on this neighborhood Facebook group like, 'Does anyone know what this woman is doing in the park?' "īarbara Klump/Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviorīy studying these videos and tracking the birds, they found that cockatoos in different regions had their own ways of opening the lids. "In one suburb, I found out only after weeks that I was the sensation of a local Facebook group," Klump says. A culture of trash can break-ins was radiating out from the birds who first figured it out.Īll that time feeding and painting birds in the park didn't come without consequences. The survey results showed that over two years, the number of trash-raiding cockatoo sightings had increased from just three suburbs to 44, indicating that the birds were learning from each other. They started by sending surveys out to different suburbs in Sydney to ask people if they had noticed the big white parrots opening up their trash bins and, if they had, when they first saw it. Hörsch and Lucy Aplin - joined Klump and Major to figure out what was going on with these clever cockatoos. "It opens up lots of questions," she says, "of 'How do they actually acquire this skill to follow this sequence?' and 'What are the differences, maybe, between individuals or also between different areas where the birds opened up in?" Discovering cockatoo subculturesĪ team of scientists - including John Martin, Sonja Wild, Jana K. First, they pry the bin open, hold the lid with their beaks, walk along the rim, and then flip it over - and she noticed subtle differences in each of these stages between different birds. The cockatoos make it look easy, but as someone who has studied animal behavior for years, Klump could see that it was actually a really complex motor action. Klump stresses that, even though urban cockatoos have access to a lot of resources and a greater variety of food options, they're not all freely available, which is what makes this behavior what she calls "an innovation." In the last few decades, Major says their populations in urban environments have increased. "The amazing thing is just that they really found a way to access another resource," Barbara Klump, a behavioral ecologist at the institute, says.Ĭockatoos typically live in woodland environments and eat a variety of seeds, nuts and fruits. He wasn't sure if they'd be as into it as he was, but to his joy, the scientists were amazed. Assembling the bird brain trustĬurious to explore this, Major sent a video to some colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. If this behavior spreads, he thought, "There'll be cockatoos opening bins all over the place and they'll have this endless supply of rubbish." A cockatoo smorgasbord. But Major later began observing several of the birds actually opening the bins themselves, and now he was intrigued. He'd just assumed that those bins were already open and overflowing - nothing clever about that. "Here it was, just munching on a drumstick, and I thought, 'Oh god, this is verging on cannibalism.' Certainly once cockatoos start eating meat, we're done for." "The thing that really got me was when I saw a cockatoo fly up from a rubbish bin, sit on a electricity wire, holding a chicken drumstick in its foot," he says, explaining that a cockatoo can perch on one leg and hold its food in another. Major was a bit taken aback by the meal choice, but brushed the encounter off.
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