What Can Dancing Cockatoos Teach Us About Ourselves?

Has a gull ever snatched a French fry from you, or made a dive at your sandwich? Would you have been more, or less, annoyed if you found out that the bird knew exactly when you would appear, and was in effect lying in wait? Scientists in Bristol, England, recently discovered that Lesser Black-​backed Gulls predictably showed up at a school just before snack time and lunch, waiting in large numbers on nearby rooftops for the opportunity to snag food from the students. The birds also visited a waste center at the appropriate time of day for freshly dumped garbage, capitalizing on weekends when humans were scarce and hence less likely to disturb them. Both of these behaviors are strikingly different from the techniques gulls typically use when searching for fish or other prey, and both only appear in urban gulls, illustrating how some creatures, at least, can thrive in human environments.

The gulls’ predictive ability is impressive, but it is just the latest indication of birds behaving in a manner that can only be described as intelligent. Move over chimpanzees, dolphins, and even bonobos. Apes and cetaceans doing clever things is so mid-​2000s. The new geniuses are birds, especially parrots and corvids, members of the crow family. An African Grey Parrot named Alex learned about 150 words, not merely repeating them but seeming to know what they meant, and could categorize objects by color and size. When he died at the age of 31, his obituary appeared in the New York Times. Even pigeons, which don’t seem especially thoughtful, can memorize more than 700 different patterns, and can classify objects as either “human-​made” or “natural.”

Original Article Link to read more

Article source: https://article-realm.com/article/Internet-Business/Email-Marketing/26275-What-Can-Dancing-Cockatoos-Teach-Us-About-Ourselves.html