Researchers say sulphur-crested cockatoos are a “large-brained, long-lived, and highly social parrot native to eastern Australia.” Increasingly common in cities, they are the subject of a new study published inA team of international scientists have proven that cockatoos “learn from each other a unique skill – lifting garbage bin lids to gather food.” According to a, the scientists say that cockatoos “spread this novel behaviour through social learning.
On the other hand, the researchers say that in some Australian suburbs too far away for the behaviour to be observed and learned, other cockatoos have figured the trash bin scenario by themselves and practice it separately, with slight differences in their actions than the initial group of cockatoos.
At the time, Aplin was a researcher at Oxford University . She and Klump found the footage very compelling. “Like many Australian birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos are loud and aggressive and often act like a pack of galahs. But they are also incredibly smart, persistent and have adapted brilliantly to living with humans,” Major said.
They collected 1396 reports by 1322 participants across 478 suburbs, of which 338 reports from 44 suburbs described bin-opening, the authors write. They point out that in almost all observed cases multiple cockatoos were present, “highlighting cockatoos’ ample opportunity to observe bin-opening.” They add that “in 88.8% of cases, birds opened general waste bins .”
The researchers marked about 500 birds with non-toxic paint at three locations to be able to identify individual birds so that they could follow which birds could open bins. They found out that about 10 percent were able to do so, “most of which were males.” The remaining birds waited until the ‘pioneers’ opened the garbage bins to scavenge for food.
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Source: Newsweek - 🏆 468. / 52 Read more »