No hands, no problem: clever parrots craft and wield tools

Parrots are smart and social, and their parents care for them for a long time — all characteristics shared with tool-using primates. Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana), medium-sized parrots native to Indonesia, are known to create and use tools in captivity, but Mark O’Hara and Berenika Mioduszewska at the University of Vienna and their colleagues wanted to know if they also do so in the wild.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02381-1

Subjects

• Animal behaviour