When scientist Barbara Klump saw some cockatoos operate a water fountain in Australia, a million questions flashed through her mind.
That’s understandable. How did they learn; why did they learn? Can all cockatoos do that and can they teach it? Why not just drink from the stream?
When it comes to displays of animal intelligence, there can never be too many questions, the answers to which Klump set out to solve through a video research project.
The ethnologist at the University of Vienna first saw the behavior in person, but she thought someone had just left the water running. Later, video footage showed how the cockatoos could use their claws and body weight to turn the spring-loaded handle to activate the water flow.
Published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters based on research conducted several years ago, Klump and her co-authors dubbed it a form of “urban-adapted local tradition” and the first of its kind, to their knowledge, ever seen in sulfur-crested cockatoos.
“They’re so innovative and good at problem solving that they seem to eventually figure out a solution,” Klump told the New York Times reporting on the paper. “In a weird way, cockatoos constantly surprise me, but I’m also never that surprised.”
Successful operation, she wrote in her study, “requires a coordinated sequence of actions, with only 41% of observed attempts ending in success.”
Indeed, over 44 days of monitoring a single fountain, only 46% of 525 observed attempts to operate i were successful. In an “awkward body position,” the cockatoos would land on the handle, grab it with their claw and lean their body weight to twist it clockwise. They used their other claw to grip the spout.
Questions remain: particularly why they use the fountains when a stream exists nearby. Klump believes it to be a series of motives.
They may have gotten a taste for the purer drinking water when compared with the stream, while drinking off the ground leaves them less vulnerable to being ambushed by predators like eagles. Lastly, it may be that they enjoy turning on the fountain, for the same reason that a child loves to repeat a difficult skill after getting it right the first time.
There could also be a ‘watercooler effect’ going on whereby the use of the fountain is a kind of social cohesion. While that might seem like anthropomorphizing of the birds, it is striking to watch them sit in a line on the chain-link fencing a few feet away and wait their turn.
Waiting their turn was another big question: why did they do it? Some birds would wait patiently for up to 10 minutes for their turn to drink at the fountain when the stream was a less-than-one-minute flight away.
This article by Andy Corbley was first published by Good News Network on 6 June 2025. Lead Image: Cockatoos in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia, will wait in line for a taste of drinking fountain water – credit Klump et al., Biology Letters, 2025.
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