Clever cockatoos bend hooks into straight wire to fish for food

September 5, 2017

In the early 2000s the New Caledonian crow Betty in Oxford shocked the world when she spontaneously bent a hook into a straight piece of wire while trying to retrieve a small out-off-reach basket with a handle from a vertical tube. Interestingly, when human children were tested on a similar task setup they showed great difficulties with coming up with a suitable solution until the age of nearly eight years. New Caledonian crows are specialized tools users in the wild and their ability to handle tools is innate. Nevertheless, in this case Betty seemed to innovatively produce a novel behavioural sequence on an unknown material.

At the time, studying cognition in birds was still a young area of research and thus her hook bending abilities became a textbook example of intelligent tool manufacture in animals. By now brain and behavioural research has shown that some birds such as corvids and parrots seem to possess complex cognition at similar levels as higher primates and show similar neuron counts in the respective brain regions. Nevertheless, the studies on Betty the crow recently came under scrutiny when field researchers from the University of St Andrews found that wild New Caledonian crows used strikingly similar bending techniques to add curvature to the tool shafts of twig tools in the wild. They therefore suggested that Betty's solution was hardly innovative but could be strongly influenced by predispositions from habitual tool use and nest building.

Researchers from the University of Vienna and the Veterinary University Vienna now tested another bird species the Goffin's cockatoo on the same task setup.

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Do smart songbirds always get the girl?

Study tests the links between cognition, sexiness and male songbirds' ability to serenade

Date: April 3, 2017

Source: Florida Atlantic University

If the early bird catches the worm, then does the smart songbird get the girl? That's what a researcher at Florida Atlantic University and collaborators from the University of Miami, Duke University, and the College of Charleston were determined to find out in a new study published in the journal Animal Cognition. Compelling evidence shows females prefer mates with better cognitive abilities in a number of animals including fish, birds, rodents and even humans. For male songbirds, their ability to sing complex songs has been suggested to signal cognitive ability and is vital for attracting females as well as repelling rival males. However, what's not clear is how female songbirds can judge the cognitive abilities of potential mates, which is a necessary first step if smarter mates are preferred over their not-as-smart counterparts.

"It would be so much easier for female songbirds to choose smarter males as their mates if male songbirds advertised their intelligence with physical attributes like bright colors and exaggerated feathers," said Rindy Anderson, Ph.D., co-author of the study and an assistant professor of biological sciences in FAU's Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. "Since songbirds don't appear to have physical displays of their cognitive ability, we focused on a learned sexual display, which is their songs."

Just as babies learn how to talk by babbling, young male songbirds copy and practice songs that they hear produced by other males in neighborhoods in which they will later establish their own territories. In some songbird populations, female preference is based on the extent of a male's accuracy to copy songs as well as their song repertoire -- the larger his repertoire the more successful he will be with females.

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