Dancing Parrot Boogies Better With a Partner

SEATTLE — Snowball the dancing parrot doesn’t just bob to the beat. The YouTube sensation, who proved last year that humans aren’t the only species that got rhythm, gets his groove on better with a dance partner.

“It’s not just an automatic response to sound,” said neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “It’s concerned with bonding.” Patel presented new research about the boogieing bird Aug. 24 at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seattle, Washington.

For the famous sulfur-crested cockatoo, it’s about bonding with his human caretaker, Irena Schultz. Snowball became an online celebrity in 2007 after Schultz, who runs the Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service in Indiana, put a video of him dancing to “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys up on YouTube.

Two papers in Current Biology in May 2009 showed that Snowball — plus a total of 14 species of parrots and one species of elephant — move rhythmically to music in a way that other animals don’t, demonstrating that dancing is not uniquely human. The ability to dance could come from a connection between the auditory centers and the motor centers in avian and human brains, which allows for speech and lays the foundation for synchronizing our bodies to music.

But some species of songbirds have this same neural connection — yet don’t dance. Other, more social birds, like crows, sometimes synchronize their movements with their long-term mates. Patel and his colleagues wondered if Snowball’s dancing has a social side.

In an experiment they called the “Dancing With Myself” test, Patel and his colleagues played music for Snowball when he was alone, when Schultz was in the room but not dancing, and when Schultz danced along with him. Naturally, the songs the team chose included Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself,” along with “Jenny (867-5309)” by Tommy Tutone and a song by Pink. The researchers tracked how much time Snowball spent dancing in each case, as well as how enthusiastic he seemed.

“We got Mack truck results,” Patel said. When “Dancing With Myself” and “Jenny” played, Snowball spent about twice as much time dancing when Schultz was in the room than when he was alone, and danced more than twice as often as that when Schultz moved to the music too. For the Pink song, Snowball spent about as much time dancing alone as when Schultz was present, but again doubled his movements when Schultz joined in.

“There’s some mutability here, but having a partner makes him much more likely to dance,” Patel said.

In a second study, Schultz danced to a different drummer. Schultz wore headphones that played the same song Snowball heard, but at a different tempo, to see whether Snowball would follow the music or his bad dance partner.

When Schultz danced to the wrong beat, Snowball appeared confused. Eventually he turned around and ignored Schultz, dancing to his own music until close to the end of the song. When he turned to face her again, his leg-lifts were less high and his head bobs less sure. “He’s less enthusiastic, more tentative,” Patel said.

Unfortunately, Schultz got sick and had to postpone the study before the team could collect enough data to draw confident conclusions, Patel said. But “the bottom line is, social context matters in avian movement to music,” he said. “Maybe that’s why only a subset of vocal learners move rhythmically to music.”

The idea “makes sense intuitively,” said psychologist Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied music written specially for monkeys but was not involved in the new work. “It’s a really interesting demonstration that begs for more studies.”

The fact that research had to stop when Snowball’s caretaker got sick — that “when the owner can’t function, the bird can’t function” — especially supports the idea that dancing is social for Snowball, Snowdon added. “That almost proves his point right there.”

The videos from that experiment won’t be available until the study is published in a scientific journal, Patel said, but Schultz and Snowball were filmed dancing together to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” at the Midwest Bird Expo in Illinois on May 22.