The Trash Parrots of Australia Are Very Annoying but Very Clever

When Barbara Klump ran into homeowners on trash-collection day, she would tell them that something very special was happening in their suburb of Sydney. She meant the birds. The big white ones?, the residents asked. The birds that are always opening trash cans and making a huge mess? Yes, those, the sulphur-crested cockatoos. The trash-raiding behavior that was annoying the suburban homeowners had also brought Klump, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, all the way from Germany to Australia. To someone like her, this behavior was an incredible discovery.

It wasn’t just that the sulphur-crested cockatoos were opening heavy plastic trash cans; it was that the flocks were how to do it. began in 2018, the behavior had been reported in only three suburbs . By the time the study wrapped up in 2019, the bin-opening trend had spread to 44 suburbs. “It’s pretty amazing,” says Alice Auersperg, a bird-cognition researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, who was not involved in the study. “You see innovation spreading.” The birds were learning from one another.