Move over, ibises. The ibis may have been sacred to the Egyptians, but in Australian folklore they’ve long been derided as “bin chickens”.
Using their long beaks to probe through human garbage, the birds have in recent decades adopted splendidly to urban environments. They’re not the only native species to thrive in modern Australia, of course. Magpies are ubiquitous, of course. Wagtails have learned to hop along in the wake of the iconic Victa mower, snatching up fleeing insects.
But the humble bin chicken faces a new challenge: the cocky.
In recent years, there have been reports of cockies flipping open the lid of household waste bins to steal leftover food.
And it turns out cockies pick up these lid-flipping skills by copying each other, allowing the behaviour to quickly spread across suburbs in New South Wales, according to a study published today in Science.
Richard Major, an ecologist at the Australian Museum, said the birds’ sharp skills are yet another example of their ability to thrive in urban areas.
“It really confirms that they are such winners at surviving in suburbia,” said Dr Major, who co-authored the study.
“It’s just amazing how they can exploit a new environment.”
Cockies’ bin-flipping abilities appear to be a relatively recent development, so far confined to parts of NSW.
The phenomenon may be a manifestation of what has been the “hundredth monkey effect”. This is the claim that, as new behaviours are learned by individuals of a species, a supposed tipping-point mysteriously sees it spread widely. Although many of the more outlandish claims of the effect have been debunked, it seems to demonstrate the existence of cultural transmission of behaviours among non-humans.
Cockatoos being notably intelligent birds, it’s probably unsurprising that they might quickly learn a useful new skill from each other.
The behaviour was first observed by Dr Major by chance, in the NSW town of Stanwell Park in 2015. To determine if the behaviour was genetic – “instinctive” – or learned, Major and co-researcher Lucy Aplin launched an online survey, over two years, of residents across Sydney and Wollongong.
Before the survey took place, bin-opening cockatoos had only been reported in three suburbs.
Then it spread — fast.
By late 2019, the birds had been seen lifting bin lids in 44 suburbs, indicating that it had quickly become a trend among their yellow-crested residents.
Of course, it could be a matter of the “Baader-Meinhof Effect”: noticing something more, simply because you’ve only just become aware of it.
Diving in deeper, Dr Major and his colleagues also found the bin-opening behaviour spread more quickly to cockatoos in neighbouring suburbs than those further away.
This suggests that the cockies were picking up their bin-raiding skills from their mates.
“If it was something that wasn’t learnt, you would expect it to turn up randomly across these suburbs,” Dr Major said[…]
The team also noticed that birds in different suburbs had developed their own style of lifting bin lids, indicating that they were likely copying birds from the same area.
For instance, some birds grabbed the handle of the lid with their feet, while others used their beak.
Some even used a mix of the two to crack open the lid[…]
The rest hung around and watched on as the bin-opening pioneer flipped the lid.“It’s not a puzzle that the birds are all solving by themselves,” Dr Major said.
“One bird will solve the puzzle, and then because other birds are watching, they’ll copy it. That’s how the behaviour is spreading.”
The most successful raiders, it turned out, were dominant males, who are larger and stronger than others.
Another question is whether the cockies are flipping lids for food or for fun. Anyone who’s spent much time observing cockatoos knows that they’re cheeky buggers, not unlike New Zealand’s keas.
I’ve watched a cocky stroll along, nipping apple blossoms and just dropping them. A friend had a cockatoo who mimicked its previous owner’s rattling emphysema cough in order to solicit attention from visitors. In the 1980s, houses built with western red cedar were regularly attacked by flocks of cockies, who just seemed to enjoy shredding the timber.
Certainly, some video shows cockies picking morsels of food after flipping lids, but is that just the cockatoo equivalent of a Kinder Surprise?
The next step for Dr Major and his team is to keep tracking the spread of bin-opening behaviour in cockatoos and investigate how they work around bins that have been cockie-proofed with rocks or bricks on their lids.
ABC Australia
If I know cockies at all, I’ve no doubt the buggers will find a way…
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