‘Opportunistic' cockatoos wait in line, drink from fountains, study finds
The 'drinking-fountain innovation' is the second time researchers have found the birds adapting their behavior to suit their environment, following a 'bin-opening innovation' recorded by the same team in the city's south, where birds were found to open the lids of household trash cans to access food waste.
Lucy Aplin, an associate professor at the Australian National University and the University of Zurich, said the study was carried out as part of the Clever Cockie project, aimed at understanding how city living can drive behavioral change and social sharing. She said cockatoos are an excellent case study, as they are 'opportunistic and successful' in human environments, while Australia's relatively short history of urbanization means that evolutionary changes can be effectively ruled out.
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'Cockatoos are fantastic urban adapters,' Aplin said. 'They're also the sort of elephant of the bird world. They're very long-lived, famously. They're also very slow-breeding and very intelligent, and so they're not the sort of species you would expect to be an automatic urban adapter, but they are.'
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Aplin said her colleague Barbara C. Klump, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior who led the research on the drinking-fountain study, 'literally stumbled' across cockatoos drinking from a fountain while out for a walk in western Sydney. Their team homed in on a 618-acre reserve in western Sydney made up of native vegetation, sports fields and, playgrounds that was home to a 'night roost' of about 100 to 150 birds.
Researchers mapped 10 drinking fountains in the area and temporarily marked 24 cockatoos with identifying colors, which they estimate accounted for 16 to 24 percent of the local population. They also tagged two other individuals to gain information on long-term movements.
From August to October 2019, they installed two cameras with a view of the fountain where cockatoos had been seen drinking. Known in Australia as a 'bubbler,' the fountain was made of a concrete stand about
three feet high
with a spring-loaded handle that needs to be twisted to operate.
Footage over 44 days showed 525 attempts at drinking, with researchers estimating that 70 percent of the local population tried to drink from the fountain. Overall, birds were successful 41 percent of the time, with those who tried to access the water for longer, or with fewer other birds present, more likely to be successful.
Footage from the cameras showed 'extensive queuing' before the birds gripped the handle of the fountain and twisted it with their feet, while also leaning their weight on the valve to ensure the water came out. Researchers found the number of attempts at drinking and success rate of the birds remained steady over the observation period, but a clear pattern emerged of birds coming to drink at 7:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Weather also impacted the visitation rate, with fewer attempts when it was raining, the team found.
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Aplin said it is a case study of an innovation that has 'arisen in response to an urban resource that's been provided by humans and then has spread through the local cockatoo population to establish as a tradition.' The data also suggests the fountain drinking is more widespread among the local population than the garbage-bin-opening behavior was at first, suggesting it had already undergone 'extensive social diffusion' before the study took place, researchers said.
Unlike the trash-opening study, where the practice was more common in males, researchers said there was no sex bias in attempts to use or success at using the fountain, suggesting perhaps that a sense of innovation is not varied by sex but rather by the resources of the bird—
with bin opening requiring more strength and therefore being suited to larger birds. The team also observed a range of techniques used to open the fountain, suggesting individual learning plays a role and possibly that those that have not yet mastered it are trying different methods.
It's the latest of findings that show how animals are adapting to urban environments around the world. Already, scientists have documented great tits and blue tits in Britain
piercing the tops of milk bottles to drink their contents, bullfinches opening sugar packets in Barbados, and long-tailed macaques bartering objects for food in Indonesia. Urban parrots are renowned for being particularly successful adapters despite being threatened by habitat loss and the wildlife trade, researchers said, with rosy-faced lovebirds in Phoenix found to use air-conditioning vents to cool off.
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Aplin said her team is calling on citizen scientists to report instances of unusual cockatoo behavior for further investigation. She is already interested in following up reports of cockatoos knocking on windows for food and opening children's school bags to steal from their lunchboxes.
'In Australia, the kids often leave their bags outside the classroom, and then the cockatoos have ready access to work down the line of bags and pull all the lunchboxes out,' she said, adding that some schools have adapted their policies in response.
'I get a lot of these reports from the public now, and it's fascinating to see the variety of behavioral flexibility and innovations that these birds come up with.'
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