Since the early 1960s membership in the club of tool users has expanded from humans to chimpanzees and beyond. To date, it includes elephants, dolphins, octopuses, crows, ravens, rooks, jays
Since the early 1960s membership in the club of tool users has expanded from humans to chimpanzees and beyond. To date, it includes elephants, dolphins, octopuses, crows, ravens, rooks, jays, dingoes and dogs (sort of). Among birds, tool use has been well documented in corvids (crows, rooks, jays, ravens), but evidence is scant in other bird families.
Now a parrot named Figaro may pave the way for admission into the tool-use club for his species, Goffin's cockatoo, also known as the Tanimbar corella or Goffin's corella (Cacatua goffini). Figaro is part of a captive colony of cockatoos in the department of cognitive biology at the University of Vienna. One day the male parrot dropped a pebble through an opening in the wire mesh surrounding the aviary in which he was housed, where it fell onto a wood beam. Figaro tried in vain to retrieve the pebble with his claw. Frustrated, he flew away, retrieved a small piece of bamboo and, holding it in his beak, attempted to use it to nudge the pebble back into his enclosure. He was unsuccessful. Luckily, a student observer noticed the exciting behavior and reported it to the researchers. No Goffin's cockatoo in the wild had ever been recorded using a tool, so the behavior was remarkable.
Yet was it a fluke? To find out, the researchers embarked on a series of experiments. In 10 different trials over the course of three days, they placed small cashews on the wood beam outside the aviary, just as the pebble was in the initial observation. In the first test, Figaro started by trying a stick that had been lying on the floor of 