Lab Notes: What makes Sydney's cockies so clever?

Australia Broadcast Center

10-06-2025

Belinda Smith: First, they came for our rubbish.
News grab: Move over Ibis, there's a new bin chicken in town. The iconic Aussie bird's mostly been prying open bin lids.
Belinda Smith: And now, they're taking our water.
News grab: Sulphur crested cockatoos in Western Sydney have been observed using public drinking fountains, learning to twist the handles and drinking from the bubblers.
Belinda Smith: And it's not just one or two cockies doing this. More than 100 have been spotted drinking from bubblers. So, what do these entertaining exploits tell us about cocky innovation? And even about cocky culture? Hi, I'm Belinda Smith and you're listening to Lab Notes, the show that dissects the science behind new discoveries and current events. To explain why these birds are so bloody brainy is Lucy Aplin, a cognitive ecologist at the Australian National University. Now, I've seen children struggle to turn a water fountain tap and they have hands. Cockies have claws. So, how do they manage?
Lucy Aplin: What they have to do is they have to hold on to the stem of the fountain. So, imagine a fountain you might get in your local sports fields, very classic upright model. So, they're gripping onto the stem of the upright part with one foot and then they're turning the twist handle with their other foot. Now, the twist handle has a spring in it. So, it'll come back so that the water doesn't run forever. So, the birds actually have to put their weight down to hold that spring. And then they have to twist their head back to drink the water while keeping the weight over the handle. So, it's quite a complex action that actually involves every body part.
Belinda Smith: It's not just the strength to turn the tap but also the flexibility to kind of manoeuvre their body so that they can then enjoy the water that's coming out of the tap. Exactly, and
Lucy Aplin: the foot-mouth coordination. I always say eye-hand-eye coordination, but foot-eye coordination, foot-eye-mouth coordination in this case. So, where do these particular cockies live? So, we observed this behaviour in the Western Sydney Parklands area just near Nurragingy Reserve, which is around sort of near Doonside train station, if anyone knows Western Sydney.
Belinda Smith: In 2019, purely by chance, one of Lucy's colleagues, Barbara Klump, first spotted a thirsty cocky.
Lucy Aplin: She was walking across the sports field and she saw them doing this. And she then walked into the Nurragingy Reserve, which is next door, and asked the rangers about it. And they said, oh yeah, they do it around here all the time. They've been doing it for ages. So, I think they thought it was a, you know, this is just what the local cockies do. As many Australians will attest, they do lots of weird and wonderful things. But we were pretty excited, so we thought, right, we have to study this.
Belinda Smith: Then, not long after that initial sighting, Lucy and her team started keeping tabs on one particularly popular drinking fountain. The
Lucy Aplin: drinking fountain that was most used was the one in the sports field right next to where the sleeping trees were. So, they were using it first thing in the morning and in the afternoon. How successful are they at getting water? So, we found when we did these intensive observations at one drinking fountain, that actually only about just under 50 per cent of the attempts were successful. So, individuals could try multiple times. And sometimes the attempts were unsuccessful because they were obviously distracted by the other birds that were queuing. Maybe a more dominant bird was queuing and they were trying to keep an eye on that bird at the same time and that was influencing their success. So, they were aware that this thing could produce water and were trying and were either in the process of learning or were very successful at it already.
Belinda Smith: Ah, right. And so, did they learn from watching other cockies do it?
Lucy Aplin: That's what we assume. So, we don't think that every individual cocky innovated this behaviour or we would be equally likely to see cockatoos drinking from drinking fountains all over Australia. Everywhere there are cockatoos and drinking fountains of which there are many places with both. So, we think that the evidence we have is highly suggestive that actually it's spreading through social learning. So, one bird or maybe a couple of birds initially invented this behaviour, worked it out and then other birds observed them and adopted the behaviour and it spread through the local group to form a local tradition in this area. So,
Belinda Smith: when this behaviour was sort of first observed by your postdoc, Barbara, was this during a particularly dry
Lucy Aplin: period? No, it was actually towards the end of winter. So, it would have been in August, September because that's when we're usually doing our fieldwork. So, it wasn't particularly dry. It was something that we were a little bit surprised by for that exact reason. We thought this is a really interesting behaviour for the technical innovation part of it. It seems quite complex and it's interesting to understand how it spreads and whether it's continuing to spread. But alongside that, there's this really interesting question which is what is the adaptive benefit of it? Because we'd just come off studying another innovation which was the bin opening behaviour which we're still studying in the south of Sydney. And there, it's really obvious what the cockatoos are getting out of it. They're getting bread or pasta or pizza or all high calorie items. Delicious things. Exactly. But here, there's an artificial lake that they've made in the lovely Chinese gardens in the Nurragingy Parklands. There's a local river they could be using. There's lots of local water sources and yet they seem to be preferring to do this highly complicated behaviour where often they also have to queue for it. So, it was a bit of a mystery we also wanted to solve as to why. So, did you find out? Well, we have three working hypotheses. Unfortunately, we couldn't answer them in this study but we're hoping to get to them. So, in this study, we wanted to ask just straightforward, are they using this as a supplement to other water sources? For example, when it's really hot and dry. And we saw no evidence for that. It seemed more like they were actually preferring to use drinking fountains over those other alternative water sources. So, then we had three follow on hypotheses. Maybe the water just tastes better. And that's not, I think, out of this world because if you think about whether you would rather go down to the creek, drink slimy, silty, muddy creek water. Or whether you might prefer a nice Sydney tap water, even though some people might be rude about Sydney tap water. It's probably still preferable to muddy creek water. So, that is a possibility that they're also making that choice. The other potential explanation we thought about is whether they just feel safer drinking from drinking fountains. Because they're usually, or all of these, in this case, were in picnic areas or they're on the edge of sports fields. So, they're in open areas with really good visibility. They're off the ground. And maybe that feels much safer than going down to that waterhole where maybe the predators are lurking behind the bush.
Belinda Smith: Part of me also wonders if there's some payoff to actually working for the water. It makes me think of shelling pistachios. Somehow, the pistachio tastes much better if you're the one cracking it open. And it's like that little bit of work has just made the reward so much more tasty.
Lucy Aplin: Yes. That exact phenomenon you're describing does have a scientific name. You know, there's jargon for everything. Yes, great. It's called contra-freeloading. And it means that you'd rather work a little bit for your reward than get it for free. And it is something that has been observed in humans. And it's also been observed in captive parrots.
Belinda Smith: Okay, so we've got bin lid flipping cockies. We've got water fountain drinking cockies. What other behaviours have been reported in cockatoos?
Lucy Aplin: So one I find perhaps a little bit disturbing is that they seem to have taken a liking in some parts of Sydney to drinking discarded energy drink cans or soft drink cans. So if they find them on the ground or in the rubbish, they'll pick them up using their bill into the sort of hole, you know, the drinking hole and then tip it back to try and get the drugs.
Belinda Smith: Oh, my gosh. A caffeinated cocky. Exactly. Just what you need.
Lucy Aplin: That's why I find that one a little bit disturbing. I'm not sure what the effect of caffeine is on cockatoos, but I don't think it'd be good. And we have going along the same sort of high energy line, just like we have observations of noisy miners in Rainbow Larrakeet stealing sugar packets, cockatoos will also occasionally steal sugar packets. That's been reported to us. And another innovation which has been reported to us from the south of Sydney, from the Northern Territory, amazingly, from a little community right up in Arnhem Land and from a couple of sites up in far north of Sydney is what we're calling the lunch bag innovation. It's a bit hard to know how to label this one. It seems to involve cockatoos going to schools where the kids leave their bags outside the classroom, unzipping the bags, taking out the lunch boxes and then undoing the lunch boxes and running off with the sandwiches.
Belinda Smith: Oh, that's so cheeky. OK, so why and how can these cockies do such amazing and often annoying things?
Lucy Aplin: There's a few hypotheses that have been put forward. When we look at overall brain size across parrots, it seems like one thing that fits really well is what we call the cognitive buffer hypothesis. And it's this idea that if you live a long time, which parrots do, your environment's going to be changing around you, unless you're in a really stable environment. But parrots are often not in a really stable environment. The environment's changing and having a large brain allows them to cope with that change that they might experience during their life. So it provides a buffer to the sort of swings and arrows of fortune by allowing you to work out solutions to changes. And that sort of explanation for the evolution of intelligence in parrots, it's not the only one, but that hypothesis fits really nicely with the urban adaptability that we see because urban environments are that. They're changing, novel environments where things can change. They can be pretty stable, but then they can change really rapidly when the local government decides to change all of the drinking fountains or whatever. So having a big brain might allow you to cope with that by learning new solutions and adjusting your behaviour.
Belinda Smith: Wow. Just like us humans then. And cockies don't just have big brains. They also have a lot of cells or neurons in those brains.
Lucy Aplin: So a cockatoo has about the same total number of neurons. So just straight count, not accounting for differences in body size or anything, just straight count. The same total number of neurons or similar to a macaque monkey, which is a medium sized monkey. Wow. So they're really punching above their weight. Like literally?
Belinda Smith: Yes. These behaviours, they're kind of quirky and fun and maybe a bit messy, but they're very interesting. But what does this tell us about cocky culture?
Lucy Aplin: Well, it tells us that they're very capable of learning from each other, from social learning. We have no evidence for teaching, so they're not doing that. Watch out if they start. No evidence for that. But they are very capable of observing other individuals and adopting the behaviour if it's beneficial. And they're capable of transmitting that behaviour over quite large geographic areas. Some of the studies we're doing now, they're not published yet, so I don't have the full set of results. But our preliminary results from experimental work is showing that actually new beneficial behaviours can spread over, say, the entire city of Canberra within just a couple of weeks. So the way their society is organised is really promotes that rapid spread and population level adoption of new behaviours. So I think that tells us something about the secret to their success and something about their life history in general. These are the elephants of the bird world. They're really long-lived, they're really brainy, and they're really social. And so they have a society that we recognise and we can also understand. We can look at what they're doing and understand it better than with some other species.
Belinda Smith: That was Lucy Aplin, a cognitive ecologist at the Australian National University. She and her colleagues published their study about the water fountain drinking cockies in the Royal Society Biology Letters last week. And thanks for listening to Lab Notes on ABC Radio National, where every week we dissect the science behind new discoveries and current events. I'm Belinda Smith. This episode was produced on the lands of the Wurundjeri and Menang Noongar people. Fiona Pepper's the producer and it was mixed by Angie Grant. We'll catch you next week.