Gus — Our Country Cat.

Social Learning in the Animal Kingdon

Image by Madalyn Cox on Unsplash — a look-a-like Gus.

I saw a program on television last week about the amazing skills that cockatoos show when hunting for food. It seems that while they had worked out that great spoils lay under the lids of garbage bins, to their disappointment, they found it extremely difficult to open those large lidded rubbish bins to forage. But with diligence and cleverness, they were able to nut out their problem and lift the lids.

And then this is where it gets interesting the birds went on to teach other cockatoos to do the same. According to the documentary, their method or practice seems to differ between Sydney suburbs so maybe some of the foraging details get lost in avian translation. But in the main, these smart birds manage to get those bin lids up to forage quite comfortably and it appears that this is because the birds are teaching each other the basic “how to’s”.

Social learning in the bird kingdom.

Cockies are learning how to bust into bins and their skills are spreading across suburbia

I was interested and found this to be fascinating as quite a few years ago when my husband and I moved out to a country rectory we took our menagerie…