African grey parrots are smart enough to help a bird in need

African grey parrots are smart enough to help a bird in need

Michael Le Page

African grey parrots are not only really smart, they are helpful too. They are the first bird species to pass a test that requires them both to understand when another animal needs help and to actually give assistance.

Besides humans, only bonobos and orangutans have passed this test, says Désirée Brucks at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. Even chimps and gorillas have failed at it.

Brucks and her colleague Auguste von Bayern first trained birds one at a time. Each was given a pile of tokens – small metal washers – and taught that they could exchange them for food by passing them to a researcher through a small hole in a clear screen.

A month later, two birds were separated from each other and the researcher by clear screens. One bird was given a pile of tokens but the hole between it and the researcher was blocked.

Not that helpful then? Which bird needed help? I assumed (perhaps naively) that it was the one not being fed. But that bird didn't get much help, if any.

The African grey parrots with the tokens didn’t get any immediate benefit: only very rarely did the bird getting food give any to the bird giving them tokens.

The claim that only they, humans and orangutans are capable of doing this is hilarious when you consider the sheer amount of cases of dogs and cats saving or protecting people and each other from a variety of dangers.
Example:

The claim that only they, humans and orangutans are capable of doing this is hilarious when you consider the sheer amount of cases of dogs and cats saving or protecting people and each other from a variety of dangers.
Example:

There's also recently reports of wombats helping other animals fleeing the fires in Australia, looking for some confirmation as apparently it was unexpected for them to host other creatures.

edit: Here's the initial report from Reddit, apparently the wombats may have been shepherding other creatures away from the flames.

There's also recently reports of wombats helping other animals fleeing the fires in Australia, looking for some confirmation as apparently it was unexpected for them to host other creatures.

edit: Here's the initial report from Reddit, apparently the wombats may have been shepherding other creatures away from the flames.

There isn't a real confirmation on the wombats but yes, animals can help other lifeforms in pretty unexpected manners. It's not a unique property of humans and intelligent primates.

Not just a pretty boy: Intelligent, devoted, alien – parrots are unlike any other pet. But what does the complex human-avian bond say about us?

lan Greenberg

A parrot’s imprinting with a human surrogate follows a predictable script: utter fidelity expressed through its natural mating behaviour. Unlike dogs, which parted from their grey wolf ancestors about 30,000 years ago, and house cats, whose domesticated origins are murkier and perhaps even more ancient, a pet parrot, no matter where it is born or how tenderly hand-raised, is a wild animal. A sustained historical encounter with people has profoundly shaped canine and feline behaviour and physique. But apart from introducing a few new colour schemes through mutation, human interaction with parrots hasn’t changed so much as a beak or a foraging technique. A human-weaned parrot — ‘psittaciformes’ is the parrot’s scientific nomenclature — is tame, but its behavioural repertoire is still wild, a true descendant of the dinosaurs. Thanks to our selective breeding, dogs and cats not only have infantilised behaviour but also neotenised faces — the big baby eyes and cute snub noses that stimulate our nurturing impulses and flood our brains with feel-good oxytocin hormones. Parrots have none of that.

All birds occupy a non-mammalian ‘otherness’ that, except for two scrawny legs, makes them seem alien and, at times, as Alfred Hitchcock knew and exploited, even threatening. They can’t entirely repel our powerful urge toward anthropomorphism, but they resist many of the other hallmarks of rewarding pet ownership. They don’t curl up on your lap or spring in the air for your ball, or sleep contently at your feet, or catch mice. How we choose to keep them, moreover, is curiouser still. Perched in tiny cages, often with their wings clipped, they are denied their very bird-ness: that is, the awesome power of soaring flight that is their most salient characteristic.

And yet many people forge a profound bond with birds, and love their winged animals with a fiercely felt reciprocity. This is especially true of parrots. Talk to dedicated parrot owners, especially owners of the bigger parrots, and they will tell you that their avian relationship has changed their lives. ‘I like birds for their flights and non-flights,’ wrote the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. ‘For their diving into waters and clouds. For their bones filled with air.’ There is, undeniably, something paradoxical about our love affair with birds.