- Arsenic Lupin
- Apr 12, 2012
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This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.
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Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Other—and the Birds Loved It (via the Smithsonian)
quote:Domesticated parrots that learned to initiate video chats with other pet parrots had a variety of positive experiences, such as learning new skills, researchers from Northeastern University, the University of Glasgow and MIT report this month in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
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During the first two weeks of the study, owners taught their birds to ring a bell, then touch an image of another pet parrot on a tablet screen to initiate a video call. In this initial phase, the participating birds made 212 video calls while their owners carefully monitored their behavior. Owners terminated calls as soon as the birds stopped paying attention to the screen and capped their duration at five minutes. Though 18 parrots began the experiment, three dropped out.
Once the birds had learned how to initiate video interactions, the second phase of the experiment could begin. In this “open call” period, the 15 participating birds could make calls freely; they also got to choose which bird to dial up. Over the next two months, pet parrots made 147 deliberate video calls to other birds. Their owners took detailed notes about the calls and recorded more than 1,000 hours of video footage that the researchers analyzed.
For starters, they found that the parrots took advantage of the opportunity to call one another, and they typically stayed on the call for the maximum time allowed during the experiment. They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird, researchers say. Some of the parrots learned new skills from their virtual companions, including flying, foraging and how to make new sounds.
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May 16, 2023 02:04
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- Arsenic Lupin
- Apr 12, 2012
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This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.
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Corvids are very smart
quote:Nests recovered from trees in Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Antwerp in Belgium were found to be constructed almost entirely from strips of long metal spikes that are often attached to buildings to deter birds from setting up home on the structures.
The discovery prompted researchers at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden to scour the internet for further examples, leading to the identification of two more anti-bird spike nests: one in Enschede in the Netherlands and another in Glasgow.
“I really thought I’d seen it all,” said Kees Moeliker, the director of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, who studied the crow’s nest found during tree maintenance near the city’s main railway station. “I didn’t expect this. These anti-bird spikes are meant to deter birds, they are supposed to scare them off, but on the contrary, the birds just utilise them.”
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Jul 11, 2023 19:07
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- Arsenic Lupin
- Apr 12, 2012
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This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.
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Help me bird people, I have a sudden urgent need for another bird name.
My local magpies, Freckles (female) and Pancake (male), turned out to have fledged three chicks this year, not the two I was expecting. I was planning to name the chicks Bubble and Squeak, but now either need a third name that fits with those, or a new set of 3 names. For what it's worth, Australian magpies are only reliably dimorphic from age 3 or 4.
Bubble, Squeak, and Beer.
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Sep 10, 2023 18:31
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May 16, 2023 02:04
