A clever cockatoo picked up a human skill—and then it spread

The feat may sound simple to a human. After all, even preschoolers can master water fountains. But these particular fountains require fine motor skills. Picture a tall pipe with a round knob and a rubber spout on top. For water to emerge from the top of the bubbler, the knob must be turned and have continuous pressure. For two-foot-tall birds with no thumbs, that means a complicated dance involving talons, bills, and shifting weight.

“Imagine that you don’t have fingers and that you have a foot and a beak,” says Louis Lefebvre, an emeritus professor of biology and avian researcher at McGill University in Montreal. “Whenever we talk about tool use in birds, we have to remember how improperly attired they are towards this kind of behavior, how clumsy they are. So it’s all the more amazing when birds can do these complicated things.”

That’s why, even though Klump has studied innovations in these cockatoos for years, she took note when she saw a line of the birds waiting their turn on a chain-link fence, hopping onto the fountain, and twisting the knob. After over a month of observation, the team found that only about 40 percent of the birds that tried to use the fountain were successful, but many more had attempted to—around 70 percent of all the birds they tracked.

This is compared to just 32 percent of observed cockatoos attempting to open trash bins in Klump’s 2021 study—the first evidence that parrots could learn from each other’s behavior. In that case, the behavior spread to new neighborhoods, from just three suburbs to 44 across southern Sydney. (Read more about the cockatoos’ trash behavior.)

But here, there was no significant spread of the behavior during the study, suggesting the birds had already learned from their pecking peers by the time Klump’s team started observing them. The researchers can’t be certain how the behavior began, but the birds may have picked up the knowledge that water could be obtained from the fountain from watching humans or other curious cockatoos.

Sulphur-crested cockatoos aren’t the first species that has shown the ability to learn from each other, a phenomenon called social learning once thought to be exclusive to humans. They aren’t even the first birds to come up with novel approaches to access water. In California’s Death Valley, for example, a raven was observed turning on a water faucet, and in Ghana pied crows turned condensed water on air conditioner units into a drinking source.

The connection between these adept avians lies in their bird brains. “A cockatoo has more neurons per cubic millimeter in the equivalent of its cortex than many monkeys,” Lefebvre says. From chimpanzees to crows, animals that can innovate tend to have more neurons. Some have argued that such innovations and social learning constitute a form of culture.