Smithsonian shares some unusual observations from Australia, where wild cockatoos have learned to operate the controls of water fountains in public parks to get a quick drink:
Barbara Klump, a behavioral ecologist now at the University of Vienna, first noticed the cockatoos drinking from public water fountains west of Sydney in 2018. She thought someone had forgotten to turn off the water, but video footage from her research project showed a bird operating the handle with its foot.
“Then, of course, a million questions went through my mind,” she tells Gemma Conroy at the New York Times. “How the hell did it figure that out?”
Now, after monitoring cockatoos with wildlife cameras placed near one drinking fountain in Sydney’s western suburbs, Klump and her research team have confirmed that the birds regularly do this in local parks—something local wildlife experts also told her, per the New York Times.
Over 44 days, the team recorded nearly 14 hours of the cockatoos around the fountain. The birds made 525 drinking attempts, of which 41 percent were successful.
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The researchers don’t yet understand why the birds go through the effort of maneuvering the fountains when there are easily accessible streams and creeks nearby. At the fountains, meanwhile, the cockatoos will wait for as long as ten minutes to get a turn to drink.
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Video is at the link.
You can read more of Klump’s findings here, in Biology Letters.