Cacatua Ciuffogiallo is one of the most incredible parrots in the world: it is among the longest -lived, it is very curious, not at all frightened by man, often even weed, and above all it is an extraordinarily intelligent bird. Sydney know it well, where in 2021 a small local population learned to use beak and legs to open the garbage cans looking for food. And where, for a couple of years, another group of cacatua He discovered how to open a public fountainto which they have been drinking every day since. The story is told in a study published on Biology Letters.
“Now it’s up to me!”. The new fashion to open the fountains invented by the cacouto Ciuffogiallo of Sydney was discovered by an ecologist from the Western Sydney University, John Martin, who was studying the foraging techniques of these birds in an urban environment. One morning, close to a sports field in the western part of Sydney, he observed a group of cacatua approaching a public fountain, of those that require to turn a tap to release the water.
The birds managed to make the fountain works even without having an opposable thumbthanks to the combined use of the beak, the legs and also of their body weight, to move the tap. Not only that: when one ended and gave up the handle, interrupting the flow of water, gave way to a partner, who repeated the operation. A doubly surprising behavior because Less than 500 meters from the Fontanella a small stream flows, a much easier way in theory to drink.
An irresistible fashion. Martin and three colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Germany, then placed a series of phototrappole and followed the cacouge cacouge for 44 consecutive days. They recorded a total of 500 attempts to open the fountain, with one Percentage of success of 46%: not exceptional, but not enough to discourage the parrots, which, hypothesize the authors of the study, not only are drinking, but they have fun solving the enigma of the fountainwhich also becomes a moment of sociality.
Fashion, among other things, seems to be widespread in the local poptage population: during observations, 70% of birds tried to solve the enigma of the fountain, with only a 30% disinterested (or too lazy to try …). We still do not know if the habit will spread to other urban populations, but given the curious and “experimenter” character of the cacougiallo cacougiallo it is not to be excluded that all Sydney fountains can soon have their parrots.
