Goffin’s cockatoos, long known as adept tool users, are the first parrots found to alter their food by dipping it in water.
Every day, the Goffin Lab in Vienna offers the same luncheon to its patrons. At 2 p.m., the diners — a flock of white parrots known as Goffin’s cockatoos — receive an assortment of dried fruit, seeds, cornflakes, bird pellets and a dry, twice-baked toast known as rusk or zwieback.
It’s a perfectly palatable meal for a parrot, and most birds dig right in. But a few of the cockatoos are more discriminating, customizing their meals with one final flourish: Before eating the rock-hard rusk, they dunk it in a tub of water.
Although the gesture is familiar to biscotti lovers with opposable thumbs, for the Goffin’s cockatoo, the behavior appears to be an innovation in food preparation, researchers reported in a study published Tuesday in the journal Biology Letters. The cockatoos sometimes devoted considerable time and energy to the task, actively transporting the rusk to water and then waiting for it to soften.
“To go through all this effort just to change the texture of your food is quite impressive,” said Alice Auersperg, the head of the Goffin Lab at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and an author of the study.
It is the first time that this food-dunking behavior has been documented in parrots — it has also been observed in grackles and crows. And it was a serendipitous discovery for the lab, which typically relies on meticulously planned experiments to test the cockatoos’ renowned problem-solving skills. “But sometimes we get gifted with accidental things that just happen,” Dr. Auersperg said.
Goffin’s cockatoos are known for their ability to use and manipulate objects. In earlier studies, Dr. Auersperg and her colleagues found, for instance, that the birds could open locked puzzle boxes and make their own tools to obtain out-of-reach food.
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December 13, 2023 at 07:01AM
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