Clever cockatoo with skilled craftmanship

Tuesday, November 6, 2012 - 18:04 in Biology & Nature

Cockatoo Figaro makes wooden tools by itself, in order to get food. Goffin's cockatoos are a highly playful and curious Indonesian cockatoo species. Therefore, cognitive biologists are now using them as a model species to investigate intelligent behaviour in birds. Together with researchers from the University of Oxford, Alice Auersperg and Birgit Szabo from the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna have made a sensational discovery: "We were able to film the cockatoo 'Figaro' using its powerful beak to cut long splinters out of wooden beams or breaking off and modifying a side arm of a branch, to rake in a nut that was out of its direct reach", explains Alice Auersperg, who led the study.

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