https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tt-ylnz34s
Cacatoes in Sydney, Australia, learned to use public water fountains by twisting a handful, despite their difficulty for birds. It seems that it is a behavior that they copy.
Crêpe sulfur cockates (Cacatua Galevvo) have already learned to open waste bins in eastern Sydney, leading to a battle of mind while humans find ways to keep their bins closed and cockatoos again determine how to open them.
After the Rangers have reported the same type of cockatoes using fountains to drink in the west of Sydney, Lucy Aplin at the Australian National University and her colleagues temporarily marked in color 24 Cacatoes – representing about a fifth of the local population – and filmed what happened in several bubble fountains, or Bubblers as they are known in Australia.
Cacatoos using a drinking fountain in Sydney
Klump et al. 2025
More than 44 days, cockatoos made 525 attempts to use a particularly popular fountain. Among these, 105 attempts were 17 of the 24 birds marked. This suggests that around 70% of the population with more than 100 birds tried to use the fountain, say the researchers.
In natural environments, cockatoes drink ponds or water collected in hollows of trees near their perch, but birds seem to use the fountains instead of these sources, explains Aplin. “They use it in the morning and in the evening, that is to say that we know that the cacatos are essentially their daily consumption-after their lifting and before they have been switched on.”
The researchers saw the queues of more than 10 birds waiting for their turn along a fence by a bubbler, although the dominant birds have jumped the queue.
Only 41% of the observed attempts ended with success – but drinking fountains is not an easy task for a bird, explains Aplin.
“Birds must coordinate their body in a fairly complex way,” she says. “They must have a foot on the rod of the fountain to drink, then the handle must be twisted and maintained. So the birds twist it with their other foot. But they have to tip their body to use their weight because they don’t have enough strength just in their foot to keep the handle.
She thinks that birds copy the behavior of each other after an individual or a few individuals has found how to do it.
“This is a clear example of culture – new behaviors that are socially transmitted – which could surprise many people who think that culture is a only human characteristic,” explains Christina Zdenek at the University of Queensland, Australia. “Their ability to innovate to access new food and water resources is among the most impressive through the tree of life.”
Why do cockatoos do it? Aplin suggests that it could happen that water has a better taste than muddy water from the pond, or that they feel more in safety of predators to these bubblers. Alternatively, it can be a fashion motivated by the thirst of birds for innovation.
Subjects:
