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Toucans, too
Thinking the cockatoos have said \"toucan stew,\" the toucans run away in a toucan canoe but the cockatoos set things right with some two-can stew.
Book
Dance behaviour in cockatoos: Implications for cognitive processes and welfare
Parrots (Aves, Psittaciformes) in captivity have been reported to show dance behaviour in response to music, which may involve complex cognitive processes including imitation, vocal learning and entrainment. Dance behaviour in parrots may be indicative of a positive welfare state raising the possibility of using music as a form of environmental enrichment. In this study we studied dance behaviour in cockatoos (Cacatuidae) through an online video study and a playback experiment. First, we identified and defined cockatoo dance movements to music from videos posted on social media to reveal the extent of this behaviour in different species. Second, to test whether music elicited dance behaviour we conducted a preliminary playback experiment on captive cockatoos, whereby birds were presented with periods of music playback, no audio playback and an audio podcast. From 45 online videos representing five different cockatoo species we identified and described 17 new dance movements. We also found 17 rare movements observed in only one bird and not previously reported in the literature, which in many cases consisted of combinations of different movements. A cluster analysis indicated that inter-species similarities in dance movements were not related to phylogenetic relatedness. In the playback study, which involved zoo-housed male-female pairs of three species of cockatoos, all birds in all treatments showed dance behaviour but there was no significant effect of treatment on the probability of showing dancing behaviour. We conclude that dance behaviour in cockatoos is composed of a wide range of different movements and further research would be beneficial to determine if music can trigger dance in captive birds and serve as a form of environmental enrichment.
Journal Article
Individual Goffin's cockatoos show flexible targeted helping in a tool transfer task
Flexible targeted helping is considered an advanced form of prosocial behavior in hominoids, as it requires the actor to assess different situations that a conspecific may be in, and to subsequently flexibly satisfy different needs of that partner depending on the nature of those situations. So far, apart from humans such behaviour has only been experimentally shown in chimpanzees and in Eurasian jays. Recent studies highlight the prosocial tendencies of several bird species, yet flexible targeted helping remained untested, largely due to methodological issues as such tasks are generally designed around tool-use, and very few bird species are capable of tool-use. Here, we tested Goffin's cockatoos, which proved to be skilled tool innovators in captivity, in a tool transfer task in which an actor had access to four different objects/tools and a partner to one of two different apparatuses that each required one of these tools to retrieve a reward. As expected from this species, we recorded playful object transfers across all conditions. Yet, importantly and similar to apes, three out of eight birds transferred the correct tool more often in the test condition than in a condition that also featured an apparatus but no partner. Furthermore, one of these birds transferred that correct tool first more often before transferring any other object in the test condition than in the no-partner condition, while the other two cockatoos were marginally non-significantly more likely to do so. Additionally, there was no difference in the likelihood of the correct tool being transferred first for either of the two apparatuses, suggesting that these birds flexibly adjusted what to transfer based on their partner's need. Future studies should focus on explanations for the intra-specific variation of this behaviour, and should test other parrots and other large-brained birds to see how this can be generalized across the class and to investigate the evolutionary history of this trait.
Journal Article
Individual Goffin's cockatoos
Flexible targeted helping is considered an advanced form of prosocial behavior in hominoids, as it requires the actor to assess different situations that a conspecific may be in, and to subsequently flexibly satisfy different needs of that partner depending on the nature of those situations. So far, apart from humans such behaviour has only been experimentally shown in chimpanzees and in Eurasian jays. Recent studies highlight the prosocial tendencies of several bird species, yet flexible targeted helping remained untested, largely due to methodological issues as such tasks are generally designed around tool-use, and very few bird species are capable of tool-use. Here, we tested Goffin's cockatoos, which proved to be skilled tool innovators in captivity, in a tool transfer task in which an actor had access to four different objects/tools and a partner to one of two different apparatuses that each required one of these tools to retrieve a reward. As expected from this species, we recorded playful object transfers across all conditions. Yet, importantly and similar to apes, three out of eight birds transferred the correct tool more often in the test condition than in a condition that also featured an apparatus but no partner. Furthermore, one of these birds transferred that correct tool first more often before transferring any other object in the test condition than in the no-partner condition, while the other two cockatoos were marginally non-significantly more likely to do so. Additionally, there was no difference in the likelihood of the correct tool being transferred first for either of the two apparatuses, suggesting that these birds flexibly adjusted what to transfer based on their partner's need. Future studies should focus on explanations for the intra-specific variation of this behaviour, and should test other parrots and other large-brained birds to see how this can be generalized across the class and to investigate the evolutionary history of this trait.
Journal Article
