In a sign that nature will always find a way, scientists have found Sulphur-crested Cockatoos are learning from each other to open wheelie bins to scavenge for food – and the behaviour is spreading rapidly.
Australian and German ecologists called on the public to report sightings of cockatoos opening bin lids. Before 2018, bin foraging was sighted in only three suburbs in Sydney and Wollongong: Barden Ridge, Helensburgh and Sutherland.
Now the sightings of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos opening bins has reached 44 suburbs, states the study, published in the journal Science.
Lead author Dr Barbara Klump, of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Radolfzell, Germany, said the behaviour spread more quickly to neighbouring areas than to suburbs farther away, suggesting the cockatoos were learning by observing others, rather than figuring out how to open bins by themselves.
“It’s not popping up randomly in those 44 suburbs at the same time, but it’s following … the geographic layout of the suburbs,” Dr Klump said.
Dr Klump hypothesises that more male cockatoos were able to successfully open the bins potentially because they are larger, or more dominant and “restricting access to the [food]resource”.
The research also discovered differences in the cockatoos’ bin-opening technique between different suburbs, revealing “local subcultures”.
“We found that if we looked, for example, at all the birds in Stanwell Park – even though some of them have individual differences – and if we compared them to birds in Sutherland … the difference [in technique]is greater than within each of those sites,” said Dr Klump.
88.8 per cent of the time, the cockatoos hated the red-coloured bins, preferring to open the yellow-lidded recycling bins.
Soon they’ll be smarter than us!
