Goffin’s cockatoos have proven capable of using combined tools to complete tasks, according to a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Researchers at the University of Vienna, in co-operation with the University of Birmingham, have conducted an experiment in which the birds had to use a stick and a ball to release a cashew nut from a specifically designed mechanism.
“What we presented them was this box with a hole in the centre, where they can insert the ball, and two open lines from both sides, where they can insert … the sticks,” said Dr. Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, lead researcher and a member of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, in an interview with Reuters.
“Also, there are two collapsible platforms on both sides where we locate these pieces of cashew, and we randomly locate these pieces of cashew within different trials.”
The study — inspired by the sport of golf — involved nine Goffin’s cockatoos, though only three were able to complete the task.
For each attempt, the birds had 10 minutes to figure out how to release the cashew nut. Out of the three successful cockatoos, one bird, named Figaro, was capable of completing the task in just over nine minutes in his first attempt, reducing the time needed to only seconds in later attempts.
That proved the birds’ ability to remember past experiences and use them to their advantage.
The experiment has also shown how different individuals within the species have different approaches to achieve the same goal. While Figaro and Fini, the second bird capable of releasing the cashew, used their beaks to pick up the stick and push the ball, Pipin, the third successful cockatoo, used his leg, proving that although cockatoos do not have the bodily configuration for the use of combined tools, like primates, they can intuitively find a way to use their body parts to do it.
Associative tool use is extremely rare in nature, Osuna-Mascaró explained, and the results achieved by these three birds are only comparable to how chimpanzees use rocks to crack nuts in nature.
Even so, Goffin’s cockatoos, which were chosen for this study for their innovative capability of solving tasks, have proven to be able to learn how to use combined tools in minutes, while primates take years.
The research is also used as a comparative method to study how the process of learning how to use tools develops in young children.
“We know that kids are interested in exploring objects, but then … they trade this for the social learning as well, whereas the cockatoos are probably more focused on individually learning,” said co-author Sarah Beck, from Birmingham University.
“And by contrasting that social learning with individual learning, we can sort of understand about how we get to be expert tool users.”
The study will proceed in Vienna with more experiments to test Goffin’s cockatoos with more complicated tasks. In Birmingham, meanwhile, researchers will run the same goal study with young children in the attempt to identify behavioural and learning patterns and compare between the two species.
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