Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia
157 comments
·June 4, 2025zik
duxup
I was visiting a place that takes in rescue animals, in this case they had a lot of birds.
In their typical speech to people about NOT keeping birds as pets they described some of the birds as "highly curious, the maturity of a human 5 year old, with an intense desire to be destructive".
BobaFloutist
My wife always joke about how parrots sound like a fun pet until you consider the phrase "Flying eternal toddlers, that cannot be diapered or potty-trained, with can-opener mouths."
gs17
On top of that, they have one tool, and it's a pair of boltcutters you can't take away. And the most clever of them have a good chance to outlive their owners.
nandomrumber
30 to 80 years in captivity! Factors: species and level of care.
20 to 40 in the wild.
Good sense of humour though.
Prcmaker
And the means to achieve that destruction. Cockatoos are like flying bolt cutters.
colechristensen
I aspire to one day befriend a local murder of crows. Not to keep as pets or to make dependent on me, but maybe to bribe to clean up trash or steal quarters for me... or to defend my honor should the need arise.
Lerc
If they are the pranksters, I wonder what that makes the Kea. I think they are counted as smarter, they definitely enjoy a bit of malicious fun.
cwsx
The most accurate representation of "Chaotic Neutral" - the cheeky bastards love stealing ANYTHING, and when there's nothing to steal they'll start ripping the rubber off your car door seals (or windshield wipers).
They are amazing birds, very deserving of the name "Clown of the Mountains".
grandpoobah
I'll never understand why we New Zealanders chose a flightless defenseless bird as our national bird when we have so many other great candidates.
lostlogin
I liked the Kea messing with traffic cones and redirecting traffic, apparently slowing cars and getting fed.
tech2
Weka can be a lot of fun too, I saw a pack of them opening someone's backpack zipper to find out what's inside.
sroussey
I was hiking and had a Kea flapping its wings on the ground to get our attention while his friend was going through our backpacks.
nsxwolf
I saw a seagull sneak up to and scream at a guy to make him drop his fish and chips and all his seagull buddies swooped in and took it.
scheeseman486
Keas are gremlins but real.
worik
Local legend has it Kea work it groups. Team work
One group will entertain the tourists (in mountain huts in the back country) by putting on ammusing displays of acrobatics and hijinks
The other team use razor sharp claws and beaks to open thir packs and get to all the interesting stuff inside
null
rukuu001
Indeed. My father spent a lot of time bellowing at cockatoos that’d land in his fruit trees and tear them to pieces. He’d storm about and wave a broom at them until they took off. Classic old man yelling at clouds.
When he was on the other side of the house in the garage, they’d take fruit from the trees and drop them on the sloping driveway so they rolled down into the garage. Come play old fella.
Nursie
> hilarious little jerks.
We had a galah chewing our hosepipe the other day. I pointed and said "oi!" and the little scamp stopped, straightened up, looked me right in the eye and ... did it again.
Oh and not to forget the kookas. I heard a pop and noise like water a few weeks ago, and ran into our living room. Outside the main window there's that hose reel mounted on the wall that was spraying freely against the glass. A kookaburra had somehow pulled the hozelock end off and was taking a shower.
technion
The kookaburras here have a reputation for taking snags right off a burning BBQ without apparently hurting themselves.
gearhart
I will never forget watching a kookaburra swoop down as my grandmother went to take a bite out of a bacon sandwich, and stealing a piece of bacon out of it without touching her or the bread. It then sat on a branch whacking the bacon against it to "kill it" before eating it.
lostlogin
I’m only just across the ditch and needed to search this.
Snag = sausage.
hhhAndrew
It seems a standard childhood memory! I had a chicken and salad sandwich downgraded to a salad sandwich while I held it my hands as a child. Couple of decades later, almost identical thing happened to my own kid.
anitil
They stole my bacon the same way, serves me right for not sharing I guess
junon
Caiques and Blue Hyacinths are definitely more pranksters, Cockatoos are just plain psychos.
rstuart4133
Or gangsters. We had a bird feeder, which we occasionally let run dry. A cockatoo got pissed with this, and concocted a scheme. When the feeder was empty he sat on the outside fridge and screeched. Once he got your attention, he made sure he was in full view and started destroying things . He only stopped when you put out more feed.
Amused by this I mentioned it at a neighborhood BBQ, and was greeted by a chorus of "oh yes, that happens at my place too". The guy holding the BBQ held up his BBQ tools and said: "See, brand new, this is the 3rd set". It was a neighborhood wide protection racket run by one bird.
junon
Amazing. Cockatoos really are gangsters.
FireBeyond
When I lived in Australia we had a wooden full length porch (elevated), and where we lived in the hills outside Melbourne we could easily have 20-30 cockatoos hang out on it in the morning. They were mercifully not loud, but they absolutely destroyed the deck rails, and we had to replace them with heavier duty industrial plastic deck.
m463
a friend had two sulfer crested cockatoos and told me a story once.
He had two, a male and a female.
The male played industriously and was adept at doing all kinds of things, like untying zipties. (my friend added zipties to the cage as a toy). The female never touched any of them.
One day, my friend and his buddy were sitting there, and they mentioned this out loud. "She can't untie these things, I think she is just stupid compared to (the male)"
At which point, the female went over, untied the ziptie, spat it out and walked away. My friend and his buddy sat there open-mouthed.
senectus1
I have fond childhood memories of having various pet gallah's/cockies. (yes in australia), I love the birds, they're fantastic pets.
but thats why I wont ever cage one up.. they clearly intelligent creatures that evolution has designed to be free flying animals. caging them up is beyond cruel.
AStonesThrow
Archaea: https://m.xkcd.com/3095/
jen729w
Fun fact: all cockies are left-handed. I used to live in Canberra, where they're plentiful. I heard this 'fact' and was doubtful. Well, I've since seen hundreds of these birds eating acorns and, can confirm, every one a leftie.
Caelus9
This is the first time I've heard something like this I had no idea animals could be left handed too! We used to have two budgies at home, but I never paid attention to which foot they preferred. Now I'm honestly tempted to go watch a bunch of parrot videos just to see if this leftie thing shows up elsewhere too.
CGMthrowaway
Fiddler crabs have one large claw and one small one. Usually which is bigger (right or left) is distributed 50/50. But there is one species - an Australian one - where only 1.4% are left-clawed.
A crab finding itself left-clawed means they fight differently and are generally less successful in fights, thus they live a more asocial life by choice and necessity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelasimus_vomeris
Tarsul
now I want a childrens movie about a left-handed crab who fights for all left-handed crabs to be let back into society.
dmurray
Why wouldn't it be like human martial arts, where a left-handed fencer or boxer has the advantage of novelty over a right-handed opponent? Even in something like table tennis this has an effect. Baseball too, but for slightly different reasons.
Illniyar
Perhaps it's an issue with multiple combatants? If fights are not one on one then having one crab be difficult to work with can be a problem
bookofjoe
My cat is left-pawed: her first swipe at something is always with her left front paw.
noelwelsh
Most cats are left pawed.
Update: see comment below. Studies are not conclusive.
CGMthrowaway
I've seen a few studies that when taken together aren't super conclusive, but suggest that perhaps around 3/4 of cats have handedness and that there may be some bias to one side or the other based on sex.
bookofjoe
See my comment just above yours!
jjtheblunt
i've seen a study (which i can't find) that boy cats are usually lefty and girls righty. that fits our sample size of four, interestingly, and perhaps randomly, since i can't find the study.
emsign
Most animals are lefties. We are the odd ones.
haunter
The why part is the most interesting because seemingly there no obvious answer to it though I like the “pure taste” theory.
>So why did the cockatoos gravitate to drinking fountains in the first place, when plenty of other water sources such as puddles and creeks are available? Perhaps they have developed a taste for the purer fountain water, Klump says. Or the elevated fountain perch helps them spot approaching predators such as eagles and falcons.
padjo
It’s kinda comical. Like gee I wonder why they want to drink cool delicious clean water from a tap, not dank stagnant water from puddles. What a mystery for the ages!
Of course I understand that in the context of scientific research you can’t just assume, it’s just a bit absurd from the outside.
positr0n
I don't know.. it seems like every dog I know would rather drink out of a muddy puddle than their clean water bowl.
xeromal
My dog is obsessed with drinking water from the toilet and will use guests visiting as an opportunity to get into the bathroom.
worik
My dog
Would rather drink the water used to clean chicken shit off the deck than anything else
Would die of thirst rather than drink slightly dusty, dog saliva contaminated water from their bowl. That Must Be Clean! Now, human!!
Narishma
> Like gee I wonder why they want to drink cool delicious clean water from a tap, not dank stagnant water from puddles. What a mystery for the ages!
Tell that to my cats. If they got the chance they will always prefer to drink from puddles of muddy rainwater instead of the clean water we give them.
account42
Depending where you live, "clean" tap water is disgustingly chlorinated. I wouldn't blame any pet for not wanting to drink that.
diggan
> Like gee I wonder why they want to drink cool delicious clean water from a tap, not dank stagnant water from puddles. What a mystery for the ages!
I mean, it could also not be about taste at all, I'm sure not all animals taste things the same, not even all humans have the same taste it seems, I can't stand fish and I love licorice, many are the opposite :)
Besides, many animals seem to enjoy just "different" things. When I'm out and about with my dogs, they love trying to drink water from puddles, even if I have a portable bowl with fresh water right next to it. Maybe it's more "interesting" or "flavorful"? Who knows...
tomashubelbauer
It also seems like it would be more fun and mentally stimulating to operate a water fountain which is a reason to do it that I wouldn't put past a cockatoo given how smart they are.
bbarnett
Gonads have driven creatures to show they are more capable than others, whether knowledge or capability, for eternity. So much of our drive, just a drive to "do better" is driven by such.
gadders
Cats are known to prefer running water - probably as it's more likely to be fresher and not stagnant. Maybe a similar thing applies here.
mfer
> So why did the cockatoos gravitate to drinking fountains in the first place
Some species of birds, like cockatoos, like puzzles. They like to figure things out.
dismalaf
Anyone who's spent long enough observing animals knows the reason... Animals are fucking lazy, why travel to find water when you can hang out, drink from an automatic machine and harass locals into feeding you and/or steal from them?
m463
skateboards are also terrible transportation devices, especially down stairs and handrails... :)
As a bird owner, they get bored. They like to play like dogs, but in 3d. They also have musical rhythm.
srean
Checkout Kea parrots too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kea#Cognitive_abilities
https://youtu.be/Yj718A7_s4A?si=yaiv4sZiY4xmzK0C. -- Kea doing probabilities and inferring from (biased) experiments
croemer
Original study that's discussed in the Science News link: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2025.001...
Caelus9
Watching cockatoos figure out stuff like this really makes me wonder have we been seriously underestimating bird intelligence all this time? We tend to associate tool use with primates, but parrots, corvids, and kea keep proving us wrong in the smartest ways. Honestly, maybe “avian cognition” deserves its own category of advanced problem solving. There’s probably a lot we could learn from their behavior not just about animals, but about ourselves and the systems we build.
i80and
Avian cognition is so darn interesting. We associate the mammalian neocortex with "higher intelligence" (which is hand-wavy), but that structure arose after any common ancestor with birds.
The avian pallium is thought to be the analogue structure in birds, evolved separately.
Which is cool! Birds have separately evolved intelligence!
berkes
Even cooler, IMHO, is that invertebrates evolved intelligence (and almost identical eyes!) parallel to primate's and corvids'.
Squid, octopi, etc have cognitive abilities that sometimes overtake that of "intelligent" mammals or birds. Yet common ancestors are about as far away as is possible in animal kingdom.
(And also please remember this when ordering calamari next time ;)
Edit: I very much enjoyed this bestseller popular science book on invertebrates intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_Minds%3A_The_Octopus%2C_...
i80and
Since reading about cephalopod intelligence, I cut calamari out of my diet cold. I quip that I have a policy against eating anything smarter than me!
MaysonL
I enjoyed the novel “Remakably Bright Creatures” which had an octupus as a main character.
4gotunameagain
And then we have octopi, with their separately evolved decentralised intelligence !
A mini brain in each arm, orchestrated by the main brain.
bookofjoe
The plural is octopuses. Octopi is not a word.
Trasmatta
I've recently gone down the rabbit hole of watching pet bird videos on YouTube. The wide range of behaviors is so fascinating. They can be so affectionate, playful, mischievous, and just plain goofy.
The African grey parrots are fascinating in particular, with their ability to connect words to more abstract concepts like counting.
soulofmischief
I can't speak for the average person but I don't think I've encountered many intelligent people who don't also recognize bird intelligence. They have a greater neuron packing density than mammals and there's plenty footage online of corvids using tools.
neoden
> have we been seriously underestimating bird intelligence all this time
another question that I keep asking myself is: are we seriously overestimating human intelligence all this time?
yen223
I think there's ample evidence that humans have some incredible things, that most animals haven't
neoden
Yes, humans invented new ways to communicate with some obvious incredible results, but how much a single human is more intelligent than a single animal? Is this difference that big as we used to believe?
Towaway69
Like inventing the artificial kind of intelligence!
I sometimes wonder whether we invented AI because we felt lonely in a universe where we - apparently by our own judgement - are the only intelligent beings.
/s
NooneAtAll3
as the saying goes "there's an overlap between the smartest bear and dumbest tourist"
elif
Ehhh it's definitely nuanced but we certainly haven't been dramatically overlooking anything fundamental.
The prevailing wisdom has been that a fully developed cockatoo has roughly the intelligence of a 3 year old.
A 3 year old figuring out how to use a drinking fountain wouldn't be world-breaking science, and I don't think this is either.
We have proven that they don't understand language and can simply mimic sounds. I don't think it's as deep as you are hoping.
SAI_Peregrinus
African Gray parrots have been proven to understand significant amounts of language.
teaearlgraycold
Could they have their own language though?
elif
Cockatoo language in nature is this:
Child: wild call
Parent: wild call back
Child: wild call back
Parent: wild call back
Child: wild call back
There are bird species with nuanced dialogue-like calls, but parrots are not him ...
lr4444lr
Their brain:body mass ratio is very high, so they've been on our intelligence radar for years, especially corvids.
rconti
Reminds me of my first Ibis encounter, in Brisbane. I was at an outdoor dining area in Southbank. There were signs warning people to beware of the ibis, and that the restaurant would not replace your food if it was taken by an ibis.
I sat down at a table, and there was a spray bottle with the condiments, promisingly-labeled "ibis spray". "Great", I thought to myself. "The ibis must hate whatever liquid they put in here". I was expecting maybe soapy water, or a lemon juice solution, or something.
I began eating, and a massive ibis landed next to me, and looked at me, threateningly. I wasn't scared. I held my ground, confidently reaching over to the ibis spray. I knew exactly how to fix this problem.
I aimed the ibis spray at the creature, and pulled the trigger.
What I now believe to be tap water shot out and struck the ibis, who did not even blink as it stared at me menacingly.
"Oh shit", I thought.
dottjt
Not at all related (though I am Australian), but I was visiting a primary school one time and there was a large sand pit for the children to play in. Next to the sand pit was a newly installed drinking fountain. However funnily, the entire drinking fountain was completely clogged with sand, I assume from children bringing the sand to the drinking fountain in order to play with the water. Thought it was funny how by simple placement, defeated the utility of that device.
anjel
Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in their forebrain https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4932926/
fblp
Given the article says this has spread amongst populations I'm suprised there's only one video on the internet of them doing this: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2025/jun/04/su...
This is also an unconventional drinking fountain.
timv
> This is also an unconventional drinking fountain.
Why do you say that?
At least in Australia, drinking fountains ("bubblers"!) are fairly non standardised. I don't recall seeing many with that rubber top, but the rotating release mechanism is pretty common. I'd say press buttons are more common but both are typical.
dedicate
Okay, first the bins, now drinking fountains?! I'm genuinely starting to wonder what human contraption these feathered overlords will conquer next, and I get a slight 'planet of the apes... but with cockatoos' vibe.
tanseydavid
A remake of Hitchcock's The Birds, but with cockatoos would be epic.
anotherevan
During our extended Melbourne lockdowns in 2020-1, the amount of cockys hanging around due to the relative lack of cars and people truly was epic. Out walking within my prescribed 5km radius the thought that I was in a Hitchcock movie did pass through my mind more than once.
Cockies are the pranksters of the bird world. They're smart and they think it's hilarious to mess with each other and anyone else. They also tear everything to pieces. So it's no surprise really that if any bird worked out how to operate a drinking fountain it'd be these hilarious little jerks.