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Self-care tooling innovation in a disabled kea (Nestor notabilis)

Scientific Reports, ISSN: 2045-2322, Vol: 11, Issue: 1, Page: 18035
2021
  • 8
    Citations
  • 0
    Usage
  • 23
    Captures
  • 24
    Mentions
  • 126
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    8
  • Captures
    23
  • Mentions
    24
    • News Mentions
      18
      • News
        18
    • Blog Mentions
      5
      • Blog
        5
    • References
      1
      • Wikipedia
        1
  • Social Media
    126
    • Shares, Likes & Comments
      126
      • Facebook
        126

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Article Description

Tooling is associated with complex cognitive abilities, occurring most regularly in large-brained mammals and birds. Among birds, self-care tooling is seemingly rare in the wild, despite several anecdotal reports of this behaviour in captive parrots. Here, we show that Bruce, a disabled parrot lacking his top mandible, deliberately uses pebbles to preen himself. Evidence for this behaviour comes from five lines of evidence: (i) in over 90% of instances where Bruce picked up a pebble, he then used it to preen; (ii) in 95% of instances where Bruce dropped a pebble, he retrieved this pebble, or replaced it, in order to resume preening; (iii) Bruce selected pebbles of a specific size for preening rather than randomly sampling available pebbles in his environment; (iv) no other kea in his environment used pebbles for preening; and (v) when other individuals did interact with stones, they used stones of different sizes to those Bruce preened with. Our study provides novel and empirical evidence for deliberate self-care tooling in a bird species where tooling is not a species-specific behaviour. It also supports claims that tooling can be innovated based on ecological necessity by species with sufficiently domain-general cognition.

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