Oz Garbage Battle Inflames Humans, Delights Cockatoos
The long-running war over garbage in Southern Sydney in NSW, Australia has evolved into a battle of wits. On one side are the humans, who want to keep their street-side rubbish bins sealed until the garbage trucks arrive; on the other side are the cockatoos, who want the opposite.
Behavioral ecologists monitoring thousands of bins in the area have witnessed repeated cycles of the sulfur-crested cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) getting into trash, humans adding security to the bins, the cockatoos learning new tricks to overcome the enhancements, humans adding new innovations, and so on. Their research is published in Current Biology.
“When I first saw a video of the cockatoos opening the bins I thought it was such an interesting and unique behavior and I knew we needed to look into it,” lead author Barbara Klump said in a news release. “They really like bread,” she says. “Once one gets a bin open all the cockatoos in the vicinity will come and try to get something nice to eat.”
The clever birds have one advantage in the food fight: the bins can’t be completely sealed with, say, a lock because the lids need to open when tipped by the automated arm on the garbage truck. So the humans place bricks, stones, or full water bottles on the lids, or fasten them with ropes, bungee cords, and sticks. The cockatoos not only learn how to foil these tactics, they teach their mates to do the same.
“The cockatoos learn the behavior from observing other cockatoos and within each group they sort of have their own special technique, so across a wide geographic range the techniques are more dissimilar,” says Klump. “It's not just social learning on the cockatoo side, but it's also social learning on the human side,” she says. “People come up with new protection methods on their own, but a lot of people actually learn it from their neighbors … so they get their inspiration from someone else.”
Like most competitions, this one may boil down to who wants it more.
Here’s a short video documenting one cockatoo’s dumpster dive.
Photo credit: Barbara Klump / Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
