Cockatoos Learn To Make Tools By Watching Their Friends

Goffin's cokatoo using a tool to get the desired treat. Image via Alice AuerspergMore than fifty years ago, humans were pretty well convinced that they were special, different from the rest of the animal kingdom. That all changed in 1964 when Jane Goodall reported her observations of tool use in chimpanzees. Now we have evidence that Goffin's cockatoos, parrots that don't use tools in the wild, have the cognitive capacity to learn to manufacture, modify, and use tools anyway.

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Cockatoos Understand Full Object Permanence - Including Invisible Trajectories

Full object permanence including invisible trajectories through time and space takes years to develop in human infants. Credit: Alice AuerspergAt a young age, kids learn that the cookies are still there, even though they have been placed in a jar. And they learn that a car driven into a tunnel will reappear on the other side.

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Cockatoos 'pick' puzzle box locks

A cockatoo called Muppet solving a bolt-type lock. (Photo: Alice Auersperg)A species of Indonesian parrot can solve complex mechanical problems that involve undoing a series of locks one after another, revealing new depths to physical intelligence in birds.

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Parrots Barter With Nuts

Cockatoo exercising patience. Polly may want a cracker, but when a parrot wants a better deal, it will trade a so-so nut for an even better snack, a new study has found.

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Not just a pretty boy: Parrot fashions tool out of stick to retrieve nuts

Who's a clever boy: Figaro uses a twig to fetch a nutFigaro may not be as talented an inventor as Leonardo da Vinci, but among Goffin's cockatoos, he's a prodigy. In their natural habitat—the forests of Indonesia these cockatoos have never been seen making or using tools. But researchers report today—that Figaro, a member of a captive colony of the birds in Austria, invents and uses stick tools of his own design. Although toolmaking and use is not uncommon in animals, this type of spontaneous innovation and individual creativity is "exceedingly rare" among nonhuman animals, the scientists note, and opens up many questions about the cognitive skills required. Understanding these processes, they say, may help unlock many of the questions about the evolution of intelligence.

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