![]() ![]() As part of their mating ritual, male palm cockatoos craft individualized percussion instruments - either sticks or seed pods - to drum against their trees. Add in the birds’ dramatic black and red plumage and tall, spiked crests and you’ve got perhaps the closest nature can come to a rock concert. As part of the display, he crafts the instrument himself and the female watches as he snaps off tree branches and whittles them just so. He sings, twirls and drums rhythmically against the tree, often using a percussion instrument, a stick or seed pod, clutched in his left foot ( SN: 6/28/17). These striking, endangered birds live in parts of northern Australia and New Guinea, and they craft and use tools not to find food, but to find a mate - a rarity that stands out even in primate company.Ī male palm cockatoo puts on a musical mating display from trees in his territory. Wild palm cockatoos are a fabulous and fascinating exception. For instance, her team found that wild-caught Goffin’s cockatoos ( Cacatua goffiniana) held temporarily in a research aviary, wielded sophisticated toolkits for foraging ( SN: 2/10/23). And “most parrots that have been studied using tools have been studied in captivity,” Auersperg says. Unlike primates, most parrots aren’t known to use tools in the wild. Like us and our primate cousins, parrots have big, clever brains, complex social lives and extended childhoods spent learning from their parents. ![]() If humans were birds, we might be something like parrots.
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