BIRD BEHAViOUR

BIRD BEHAViOUR

The ways animals play with inedible objects may be precursors functional behaviours such as tool use and goal directed object manipulation. For these reasons, species of high technical intelligence are also expected to play intensely with inanimate objects when no obvious goal is pursued.

          Within object play, combinatory actions are considered a particularly informative trait in animals as well as human infants: Children start bashing two objects together when they are about 8 months old, at 10 months, they combine toys with elements from their environment, such as inserting them into cavities or stacking rings on a pole. Only after their second year, infants start using objects as tools to obtain a desire goal.

          In animals this has so far mainly been studied in primates. Within this group, complex object combinations during play are largely limited to capuchin monkeys and the four great ape species. These are also the species, which prominently stand among primates, for their innovative tool use abilities. Interestingly, within birds, the crow family as well as parrots have similar relative forebrain body sizes as the great apes and also perform at similar levels in many cognitive tasks.

          To investigate the play behavior of parrots and crows researchers confronted groups of  three crow species as well as a total of nine parrot  species within an identical set of wooden toddler toys of different shape and color categories as well as with  a ‘playing ground’ offering various tubes and holes for insertions  and poles for stacking rings. Whereas animals of most species interacted with the toys, complex objet-object combinations were largely limited to a subset of the species.

          The frequency of playfully combining two free toys was highest n New Caledonian crows and in Goffin cockatoos, Black Palm cockatoos and Kea within parrots. Goffins and New Caledonian crows even combined up to three toys.

          “New Caledonian crows are innate tool users and also the only crow known to regularly use and manufacture different types of foraging tools n the wild,” says Alice Auersperg from the University of Vienna who organized the study: “The Black Palm cockatoos are also habitual tool users, with the males using wooden logs as drum sticks to attack their females to potential breeding sites and to deter competitors. The Goffin cockatoo as well as the kea, although not innate tool users, have both repeatedly demonstrated the  capacity for  innovative and  flexible tool use as well as high-level performances in problem solving tasks involving object manipulations  in captivity.”