Latest news with #BarbaraKlump
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Wild cockatoos are learning how to use water fountains
Animals constantly adapt to their environments, but keeping up with humanity's dramatic influence on the natural world poses unique challenges. While this unfortunately ends in disaster for many species, some populations are figuring out new ways to navigate urban spaces. Back in 2022, wildlife biologists confirmed that a community of wild, sulfur-crested cockatoos in Sydney, Australia had learned how to open the lids of curbside trash bins on garbage day in order to snack on locals' leftovers. But that's not all these birds can do. A similar group of Australian 'cockies' are also figuring out the mechanics of drinking fountains in public parks. This isn't simply pressing a button to get a drink, either. The local park's fountain design requires constant pressure to enable water flow from the tap necessitating the use of both feet. The latest behavioral discoveries were recently documented in the journal Biology Letters. 'Overall, these observations showed that individuals operated the drinking fountain using coordinated action with both feet, with one (most often the right) foot on the twist-handle (valve) and one foot gripping the rubber spout (bubbler) or both feet on the valve,' the team wrote in their paper. 'The weight of the bird would then be lowered to turn the twist-handle clockwise and keep it from springing back and the head turned to access the flowing water.' As New Atlas explained on June 4, the study developed after lead author Barbara Klump at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior witnessed the behavior firsthand. Klump wondered how often the cockatoos engaged in the adaptation, and enlisted collaborators from Western Sydney University, the Australian National University, and the University of Vienna to help investigate. After identifying the fountains that the birds stopped at most frequently (as evidenced by beak bitemarks on their plastic outlets), the team installed cameras nearby to monitor the hotspots. Next, they flagged 24 regularly visiting cockatoos and marked them with temporary red dots. The team then stepped back and watched the park's birds do their thing. After 44 total days of recording, Klump's team observed that the cockatoos attempted to use the drinking fountains 525 times over at least the last two years. These attempts weren't surefire ways to receive water, however. While the cockatoos showcased multiple strategies when trying to use the fountains, the most common moves that led to both success and failure were virtually identical. Approximately 41 percent of the birds successfully utilized the fountains. That said, the regulars marked with the red paint evidently learned a bit better through trial and error, achieving their goal about 52 percent of the time. Interestingly, the team's previous study on the garbage bin-opening cockatoos indicated a nearly identical success rate in their marked birds. The team theorizes this suggests parallels between either the physical difficulty of both tasks, or the time it takes to learn the behavior. Researchers also noticed another fascinating detail after they compared their previous observations on the garbage bin-opening cockatoos with their water fountain brethren. 'In contrast… where the bin-opening was heavily biased towards males, we observed no sex bias in attempts to use, or success at, the drinking fountain,' they wrote in the study. 'This might suggest that innovativeness per se does not vary between sexes, but rather is the result of an extrinsic difference between the resources.' The study's authors suggest bin lids might necessitate more physical strength from the birds, thus requiring 'modifying the cost-reward trade-off for smaller females.' Another possibility is that competition for the limited garbage resources may lead to favoring dominant males, whereas an essentially endless water supply allows more equal access for all the birds. Regardless, the researchers believe both the fountain and trashcan adaptations illustrate how innovation may be a 'key mechanism' for certain parrot species to continue adapting in the face of human-induced change. Given how clever they have already proven to be, these likely won't be the last adaptations we see from them.
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A clever cockatoo picked up a human skill—and then it spread
Australia's sulphur-crested cockatoos are bringing a new meaning to the term 'bird-brained,' one innovation at a time. A few years ago, it was opening garbage bins to find food, a practice birds across dozens of neighborhoods eventually adopted. But now, the social birds are lining up, waiting their turns, and drinking straight from water fountains in a Sydney park. And, according to researchers, it's just the latest evidence of cockatoo 'culture.' 'These birds, they constantly surprise me,' says Barbara Klump, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany and lead author on a study of the new behavior in this week's Biology Letters. The feat may sound simple to a human. After all, even preschoolers can master water fountains. But these particular fountains require fine motor skills. Picture a tall pipe with a round knob and a rubber spout on top. For water to emerge from the top of the bubbler, the knob must be turned and have continuous pressure. For two-foot-tall birds with no thumbs, that means a complicated dance involving talons, bills, and shifting weight.'Imagine that you don't have fingers and that you have a foot and a beak,' says Louis Lefebvre, an emeritus professor of biology and avian researcher at McGill University in Montreal. 'Whenever we talk about tool use in birds, we have to remember how improperly attired they are towards this kind of behavior, how clumsy they are. So it's all the more amazing when birds can do these complicated things.' That's why, even though Klump has studied innovations in these cockatoos for years, she took note when she saw a line of the birds waiting their turn on a chain-link fence, hopping onto the fountain, and twisting the knob. After over a month of observation, the team found that only about 40 percent of the birds that tried to use the fountain were successful, but many more had attempted to—around 70 percent of all the birds they is compared to just 32 percent of observed cockatoos attempting to open trash bins in Klump's 2021 study—the first evidence that parrots could learn from each other's behavior. In that case, the behavior spread to new neighborhoods, from just three suburbs to 44 across southern Sydney. (Read more about the cockatoos' trash behavior.)But here, there was no significant spread of the behavior during the study, suggesting the birds had already learned from their pecking peers by the time Klump's team started observing them. The researchers can't be certain how the behavior began, but the birds may have picked up the knowledge that water could be obtained from the fountain from watching humans or other curious cockatoos. Sulphur-crested cockatoos aren't the first species that has shown the ability to learn from each other, a phenomenon called social learning once thought to be exclusive to humans. They aren't even the first birds to come up with novel approaches to access water. In California's Death Valley, for example, a raven was observed turning on a water faucet, and in Ghana pied crows turned condensed water on air conditioner units into a drinking connection between these adept avians lies in their bird brains. 'A cockatoo has more neurons per cubic millimeter in the equivalent of its cortex than many monkeys,' Lefebvre says. From chimpanzees to crows, animals that can innovate tend to have more neurons. Some have argued that such innovations and social learning constitute a form of culture. (Palm cockatoos use tools to make sweet, sweet music.) Although cockatoos regularly interact with members of neighboring roosts, a key way for behaviors to spread, so far, it seems that other roosts haven't yet learned from these bubbler-loving birds. The researchers aren't sure why, although it might be because many of the surrounding water fountains in Sydney don't use the same mechanisms as the ones in the park. Still, through citizen science reports, researchers have already heard of separate cockatoos using water fountains in other parts of the country over 500 miles away. 'Just last week, somebody contacted me from Brisbane,' says Lucy Aplin, a cognitive ecologist at Australian National University and co-author of the study. 'Reporting that in a park there, the birds have started to open the drinking fountains, and they're of a different design as well.' With Australian population numbers expected to increase by 12 percent over the next decade, urban areas will likely grow, and adapting to these rapidly changing environments can do much more than provide a refreshing sip of water—it can save entire species. 'Innovation provides resilience against threats that can lead to extinction,' Lefebvre city authorities and residents will respond to the birds' drinking habits as they did in the so-called 'battle of the bins' in 2021 remains to be seen, although there are no guarantees the cockatoos won't find innovations to use new bird-proof water fountains. 'These birds are very resilient, and they're very adaptable,' Aplin says. 'I'm prepared to be surprised.'
ABC News
03-06-2025
- General
- ABC News
Sydney's sulphur-crested cockatoos spotted using drinking fountains
First they opened bins, now crackles of Sydney's sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) have been recorded by scientists waiting their turn to use drinking fountains. The birds, which roost around the Western Sydney Parklands, have figured out how to operate twist-handled bubblers, according to a new study. The behaviour was observed in a group of up to 200 birds, scientists report in The Royal Society Biology Letters. Study co-author Lucy Aplin, a behavioural and cognitive ecologist from the Australian National University, said it took coordinated actions for the birds to access water from the spring-loaded fountains. "It's just one of your bog-standard old-fashioned drinking fountains that you find all across sports fields in Australia," she said. "They [cockatoos] hold on to the stem and they twist with their foot but then they have to lean their weight while they twist as well. Dr Aplin said the whole process looked a "bit funny". "It's a bit of an awkward body position they have to hold, but it's pretty impressive," she said. Sulphur-crested cockatoos are well-known for their urban antics causing havoc on bin night in more than 60 suburbs in Sydney's south. But the population in Western Sydney is a different mob. After the study's lead author, the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior's Barbara Klump, saw the drinking behaviour first-hand, she set up a study to track the behaviour of cockatoos around a well-used drinking fountain. First the researchers identified 24 individual birds by painting them with dots, then they used wildlife cameras to monitor attempts to use the bubblers by these and other birds in the local area. Over 44 days, the cameras recorded 525 attempts and collectively the birds were successful 41 per cent of the time they tried to drink, with the marked birds being slightly more successful. Dr Aplin said about 70 per cent of the local birds, which roosted close by, were using the drinking fountain. "They use them as a preferred place to drink no matter whether it's hot or if there's other water sources available," she said. All ages and sexes participated too, unlike with the bin opening behaviour, which is mostly done by males. "Something about the bin opening requires strength, and that's why it's male biased," Dr Aplin said. "[Drinking from bubblers is] a very complex behaviour that requires lots of different fine scale motor actions, but not brute force." Cockatoos are able to work out something tricky like turning a handle because they have brains that are relatively large for their bodies. Their forebrain, which deals with advanced cognitive abilities like tool use, is packed full of neurons like chimpanzees, which also excel at complex problems. Alex Taylor, who studies biological intelligence at the the Autonomous University of Barcelona, said it was clearly tricky to get a tap to work when you had the body of a bird. "Which explains why birds are only successful 50 per cent of the time when trying to use the tap," Dr Taylor, who was not involved with the research, said. "Still this is a pretty good success rate on a hot day when you are thirsty." Dr Taylor said the study begged the question of why only a single species was exploiting human water taps and not others. The exact reason the cockatoos use the bubbler instead of other water sources like a lake or creek is not understood. But there are several hypotheses that researchers want to test. "One possibility is the water just tastes better," Dr Aplin said. That's a theory Irene Pepperberg, an animal behaviourist from Boston University who was not involved in the study, also thought was possible. "The resource is unlimited, so it is probably worth it to keep trying until they figure out the successful behaviour and, if they fail, they seem to have other water sources. "The birds do seem to learn about the source from one another; whether they learn the specific technique from each other is a bit less clear." Another idea is the birds like how the bubblers sit about 1 metre off the ground. Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist from the University of Veterinary Medicine who was not part of the study, said this was because drinking from a ground source was risky and left them exposed to predators. But she said another reason they might use the bubblers was because the birds liked to undertake an activity even if there was no food reward. Dr Pepperberg said she recently did a study with umbrella cockatoos where 40 per cent of the time they chose to shell nuts rather than eat ones that were already shelled. The team behind the new bubbler research hopes to drill down into the reasons behind the behaviour as well as other cockatoo innovations in future studies. Dr Aplin said she had received other reports of cockatoos using bubblers with levers and unzipping bags to access lunch boxes. She encouraged people who saw these kinds of behaviour to report it through the Big City Birds App. Gisela Kaplan, an emeritus professor of animal behaviour from the University of New England, said several bird species seemed to exploit taps in the outback in different ways to cockatoos. "The moment [the taps] are used, the birds now fly in and take the drops that fall down and then, once the person has left, also lick out the last drops that are in the tap," Professor Kaplan, who was not involved with the study, said. She said she had witnessed a great bowerbird in Larrimah, Northern Territory, work with its beak at a tap nozzle attachment until water drops were generated. Dr Aplin said ultimately there was an important message behind all these observed behaviours beyond just funny anecdotes. "Urban animals that are adaptable and have expressed behavioural flexibility and have large brains are going to try and use the habitats that we provide them with," she said. "So if we want to increase biodiversity in cities, we need to think about increasing the sort of habitat requirements for species that might not be so adaptable." On the other hand, Dr Aplin added, we could also use urban design to manage those species that are more adaptable.
New York Times
03-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
Clever Cockatoos Have Figured Out How to Drink From Water Fountains
Most birds go for ease when looking for drinking water. But the sulfur-crested cockatoos in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, often prefer to quench their thirst with a challenging puzzle. In the city's western suburbs, some of the birds have figured out how to use public drinking fountains. The mohawked parrots deftly use one foot to twist the handle open while their other claw grips the spout. It's unclear why the cockatoos go to the effort of using drinking fountains when there are plenty of accessible water sources nearby. They don't seem to use them more often during hot weather. One possible explanation is that the task of operating the fountains is simply more fun than sipping water from the local creeks. 'If there is no super urgent need and you're not dying of thirst, then why not do something you enjoy?' said Barbara C. Klump, an author of a study of the birds published on Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters, and a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. It's not the first time cockatoos in this area of Australia have been seen cleverly manipulating urban objects for their own benefit. Dr. Klump and her colleagues have also tracked the birds flipping open garbage bins across greater Sydney, a socially learned behavior that has resulted in an arms race (or maybe a wing race) with human residents. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
