Goffin's cockatoos took carpentry lessons and successfully learned how to make and use wooden tools.
The finding is believed to be the first controlled experimental evidence of birds learning to use tools through a social situation, the University of Oxford reported.
University of Oxfords are an Indonesian parrot that have never been observed to use tools in the wild. Despite this researchers watched a captive adult male Goffin's cockatoo named "Figaro" sculpt stick tools from wooden beams in order to whack nuts into reach.
To see if this practice could be socially passed on the team allowed other cockatoos to watch Figaro construct the tools in a sort of "teacher" and "student" situation. One cockatoo group watched Figaro using a ready-made stick tool while another group watched as the tools displacing the nuts without the help of Figaro, or magnetically moving nuts towards him.
Three males and three females that saw Figaro complete his demonstration interacted more with the wood than those who saw the "ghost interactions." All three males in the demonstration group achieved the ability to build the tool, while none of the females did.
"This is the first controlled evidence for the social transmission of an original tool use event in any bird so far," said Stefan Weber, a student from the University of Vienna, who was involved in the data collection.
The birds didn't only learn the technique, but also improved upon it. Figaro held the tool by the tip, inserted the tool through the cage, and raked the nuts towards them. The observing birds instead laid the stick flat on the ground and propelled the nuts towards them using a " ballistic flipping movement," which proved to be more effective.
"This means that although watching Figaro was necessary for their success they did not imitate his exact motor activities. Successful observers seemed to attend to the result of Figaro's interaction with the tool but developed their own strategies for reaching the same result, rather than copying his actions. This is typical of what psychologists would call emulation learning," said Alice Auersperg who led the study at the Goffin Lab at the University of Vienna.
