Unlike most of the 350 known parrot species, the sulphur-crested cockatoo is flourishing, particularly in urban environments. These handsome, two-foot-tall white parrots with vibrant yellow head crests are native to eastern Australia and nearby Pacific islands. For one thing, in a wild landscape it’s difficult to account for all the factors that might be influencing birds’ actions.īut because Sydney’s sulfur-crested cockatoos reliably frequent the same garbage bins, that provided an ideal study setup for Klump to observe these cheeky “urban explorers,” she says. Part of the reason for that lack of evidence is that while parrots in captivity are well studied- think Alex the African gray parrot, who had the intelligence of a three-year-old-it’s harder to observe cultural behavior in wild parrots. ( Read about the hidden world of whale culture. “You would expect parrots also tick all these boxes, but we didn’t have evidence for it”-until now, says Klump, a National Geographic Explorer who is on staff at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Other social species with long lives and big brains, such as crows, great apes, and cetaceans, practice such so-called foraging culture-for instance, chimps show each other new ways to open nuts. This discovery means that parrots “have joined the club of animals that show culture,” says behavioral ecologist Barbara Klump, leader of the study that appears this week in the journal Science. In Sydney, Australia, some sulfur-crested cockatoos-a noisy, gregarious bird that’s common in eastern Australian cities-have figured out how to open garbage bins, a behavior that other cockatoos quickly copied, allowing them to exploit a new food resource. Now, research shows that these large-brained birds can also learn new behaviors from each other, which only decades ago was thought to be a uniquely human trait. ^ "Cockatoo - Eleonora :: Pets site :: Pets information".Parrots can mimic human speech, move in time to music, and even help others in need.on Music Perception and Cognition (Adelaide: Causal Productions) Schulz, Irena & Schulz, Charles (2008-08), "Investigating the human-specificity of synchronization to music", Proceedings of the 10th Intl. ^ "Birds > Parrots > Cockatoo - Eleonora Main Page".^ "ANIMAL BYTES - Medium Sulpher-crested Cockatoo".Birds of New Guinea: Distribution, Taxonomy, and Systematics. ^ Bolens, Bo Watkins, Michael Grayson, Michael (2020).^ a b "Sulphur-crested Cockatoo Fact Sheet".The Cockatoos: A Complete Guide to the 21 Species. ^ "Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua Galerita)". Like all cockatoos, the Eleonora cockatoo is widely considered to be very intelligent and emotionally complex. One notable Eleonora cockatoo is Snowball, a bird recently demonstrated to be capable of beat induction – in other words, that the bird is capable of perceiving a musical beat and dancing to it. Both parents incubate the eggs and in turn provide for the chicks. The female lays 2–3 white oval eggs, which hatch after a period of 30 days. The birds build their nests in a tree hollow or rock crevice. The breeding season of this cockatoo is mainly from September to January. It feeds on nuts, berries, flower buds, flowers, seeds and insects. In the wild, the Eleonora cockatoo is found in open woodlands, forests, and semi-arid forested areas, as well as partially cleared forest areas. The Eleonora also has a bald patch behind its crest. The Eleonora cockatoo often has pale yellow ear patches, and yellow diffusion throughout the body, especially under the wings and tail. Although a smaller and lighter bird, in practice it may be difficult to differentiate this subspecies from the Triton cockatoo. Apart from the size difference, the Eleonora differs from the greater sulphur crested in that it doesn't have as prominent white eyerings (they often are a pale blue), the crest of an Eleonora is often less curved and it doesn't have the pointy upper mandible, which is only found in Cacatua galerita galerita. It is the smallest of the four subspecies of Cacatua galerita, at approx.
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