Cockatoos Demonstrate Their Ace Tool Using Skills To Play Golf

A new study finds that problem-solving cockatoos can combine simple tools to accomplish a task, which is a cognitive ability that only a very few primates were previously known to perform

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An international team of behavioral researchers at the Messerli Research Institute with the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna have discovered that Tanimbar cockatoos, also known as Goffin’s cockatoos or Goffin’s corellas, Cacatua goffiniana, spontaneously use a combination of simple tools to accomplish a task, according to a recently published study. These inventive cockatoos taught themselves how to play ‘cockatoo golf’ using these tools.

The goal of this particular study was to understand whether these innovative parrots’ tool-using abilities are on par with those of early humans as demonstrated in a test inspired by the game of golf. This study is also part of a wider international and interdisciplinary project comparing children’s innovation and problem solving skills with those of cockatoos.

In this test, the cockatoos played a version of golf by holding a stick in their beak and using it to push a ball into tube above a collapsible platform to release a cashew nut (their favorite treat).

Tool use is rare in animals, especially the use of compound tools (where two simple tools are affixed to each other, such as an ax or spear) or composite tools (where two simple tools are used together, such as a stick and a rock). But these sorts of tools are used in many sports, such as hockey, cricket — and golf.

Where did the inspiration for ‘cockatoo golf’ originate?

‘Cockatoo golf’ was the brain child of lead author, Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, who credited his inspiration to his daily walks through a golf course on his way to work.

“In my beautiful uphill walk to the lab, I pass a castle (Goldegg), and a golf club (Goldegg Golf Club)”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró elaborated in email. “One day, I was walking and thinking about how to design a composite tool use experiment while collecting golf balls.”

Suddenly, he realized that the answer was always there, right before his eyes: “Why don’t I design an experiment where the cockatoos have to play golf?”

Dr Osuna-Mascaró has an interesting background. After earning his PhD in palaeontology at the University of Granada, he went to the University of Georgia to study tool use in wild chimpanzees under the mentorship of comparative psychologist, primatologist and Emerita Professor of Psychology, Dorothy Fragaszy.

“Her approach to the study of tooling is very focused on movement and spatial relations, something fascinating and far deeper than what had been done regarding avian tool use”, explained Dr Osuna-Mascaró in email.

Although he already has one PhD, Dr Osuna-Mascaró transitioned into studying animal behavior and cognition by pursuing a second PhD at Alice Auersperg’s Goffin Lab.

“I wanted to bring the theoretical framework developed for primate tool use, an older and more [established] field, [and apply it] to avian tool use.”

But unlike wild chimpanzees, Goffin’s cockatoos don’t use tools in the wild, so what inspired Dr Osuna-Mascaró to study these parrots in this context?

“Goffin’s [cockatoos] are truly fantastic animals”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró replied in email. “Although they don’t use tools in the wild in a wide-species level, they are capable of solving tool-related tasks in a shocking fashion. They use tools in a general cognition-dependent way, [although] they are not specialized for that as are other birds, that makes it even more fascinating.”

What does ‘cockatoo golf’ look like?

The Golf Club Task is a clear plexiglass puzzle box with a floor covered in a rough carpet-like “green”. The floor has a tube on each side that leads to a collapsible trapdoor held in place with magnets. One of these two platforms is baited with a small portion of a cashew nut as a reward that is visible to the cockatoo golfer (Figure 1A).

The top portion of the Golf Club Task apparatus was made of wood and was firmly attached to the plexiglass base during testing (Figure 1B). The front of this structure has a metal grid affixed to it with a central round hole and two narrow openings on each side that is narrower than the central hole and spans the length of the apparatus. Each cockatoo was given a wood stick and a white ball that could fit — barely — through the central hole but not through the front grid nor the space spanning the front of the apparatus.

To obtain the cashew nut reward, the ball must first be inserted into the Golf Club Task apparatus through the central hole, then the stick inserted into the box and used to manipulate the ball into the trapdoor on the side where the treat is, which then releases the nut into the waiting beak of the golfing cockatoo.

The Golf Club Task was designed to test whether the cockatoos can devise a workable solution to a challenge that requires a very advanced level of tool use. This skill is known as composite tool use and it relies on using the different functions of two different tools to accomplish one particular goal. Composite tool use is so advanced that only few primates are known to perform it.

“The canonical example of composite tool use in the wild (and probably the only one out there), is nut cracking”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró noted in email. “Chimpanzees crack nuts using two different tools, one big stone as an anvil, and a smaller one as a hammer. I wanted to test if our cockatoos are dexterous using composite tools, but I wanted to find something more natural for their bodies than hammering stones.”

Chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys are the only tool-using primates known so far. They require years of practice before they can crack nutshells without crushing the nut into powder. But remarkably, the cockatoos managed to think their way through the required series of tasks required to master the Golf Club Task after only playing with it a few times.

This fits nicely with more than one decade of surprises from observing Goffin’s cockatoos’ abilities to spontaneously make and use tools to address specific tasks. The first observation of tool use came when a researcher noticed one very clever parrot, named Figaro, who is the ‘alpha parrot’ in the Goffin Lab’s flock, applied his tooling skills to obtain an out-of-reach cashew nut (read more here; ref).

None of the cockatoos in the Goffin Lab’s flock had ever before used tools in combination and were given no information about how to solve the Golf Club Task to get that coveted cashew nut. So how did Dr Osuna-Mascaró teach the cockatoos to play golf?

“I didn’t!” He exclaimed in email. “They learnt it by themselves.”

The only clue the cockatoos were given was that the side platforms were collapsible.

“[O]nly three cockatoos mastered the task”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró replied in email. “Two more were able to solve it eventually, but without reaching the desired consistency to be considered successful.”

“A lucky shot doesn’t make a cockatoo a golf expert”, he added.

Although five of the eleven participating cockatoos didn’t find a way to solve the Golf Club Task, they were actively employing other approaches to obtain that coveted cashew nut. Their favorite method was to try to destroy the box itself.

“They are very clever animals, but also very destructive, like washed gremlins after midnight”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró remarked in email.

Thinking outside the box

“They had previous experience with sticks, and with balls, but they never combined them, and they never had interaction with [using] both like this”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró explained in email. “So the bigger problem that they had was to use the stick in a different way than they used it in previous experiments. It’s like those insight tests where you have to think outside of the box.”

At first, the three birds that did end up solving the Golf Club Task took almost the entire 10-minute time period to figure it out. But after a few trials, their times improved dramatically.

And then there’s that michievous feathered Einstein, Figaro, who solved the Golf Club Task on his first try and then set the record of just six seconds on his fourth try.

“It was shocking.”

As an added bonus, Figaro cheated on his second try by using the stick as a lever to elevate and drop the box so the platforms collapsed, thereby releasing the cashew nut.

“This is very impressive, after a trial that lasted for 9 minutes, he solved it super quick, as remembering those movements that were functionally relevant on the previous trial”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró explained in email. “We usually avoid talking about ‘understanding’ because it’s a heavily loaded and difficult term to define, but it really seems Figaro understood it.”

“One of the most amazing aspects of the process was to observe how these animals each invented their own individual technique in how to grip the stick and hit the ball, sometimes with astonishing dexterity”, Dr Osuna-Mascaró said.

“One of the birds operated the stick while holding it between the mandibles, one between the beak tip and tongue and one with his claw, similar to a primate.”

Our cockatoo overlords

This experiment reveals that Goffin’s cockatoos, which are not evolutionarily specialized to use tools, possess cognitive abilities are so formidable and so flexible — they are just so smart — that they are able to combine the function of different tools in innovative ways to solve new challenges, and they can do so in just a matter of minutes.

I, for one, eagerly await the arrival of our cockatoo overlords.

Source:

Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró, Roger Mundry, Sabine Tebbich, Sarah R. Beck & Alice M. I. Auersperg (2022). Innovative composite tool use by Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana), Scientific Reports 12:1510 | doi:10.1038/s41598-022-05529-9

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