By Angus Dalton
Cockatoos in Sydney have learnt to operate and drink from bubblers in another extraordinary urban adaption that has snatched the attention of international scientists.
Sydney’s city-slicker cockies were already notorious for learning to flip open rubbish bins and ransack them for juicy spoils, which unleashed an arms race across the suburbs between the parrots and people trying to deter the raids.
Cockatoos drink from a water fountain in western Sydney.Credit: Klump et al., Biology Letters 2025
Ecologists who studied the bin-flipping behaviour were observing the cockatoo’s foraging patterns in western Sydney a few years back when they spied an excited flock gathered around a drinking fountain, squawking and flashing their crests.
One by one, the cockatoos alighted on the bubbler, grasped the tap, and turned the water on.
“We all said, ‘What the hell?’” Dr John Martin, co-author of the study alongside colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany, said.
“We’d already been undertaking the bin-opening research, so we knew that there was social learning in this species, and this gave us a second opportunity to test what would be a novel behaviour that we hadn’t seen anywhere else in the landscape.”
The bin-lid-flipping behaviour has spread across the city.Credit: Dr John Martin
The researchers daubed paint onto 24 of the cockatoos for identification and, over 44 days, recorded them trying to twist the bubbler on 525 times. The cockatoos were successful about 41 per cent of the time.
Martin believes the cockatoos may have watched humans using the bubbler and turned their sharp brains and powerful claws to mimicry.
“How does the bird realise that they can get water from the bubbler? How do they realise they can turn the handle? It’s a logical leap to say that they observed people, and then they’ve tried it themselves,” Martin said.
“They’ve got two middle toes and two toes pointing back. That allows them to grip things in a way similar to us. They essentially have this ‘opposable thumb’, so to speak … a lot of birds just wouldn’t be able to do that.”
‘There are fascinating and novel things happening in the natural world no matter where you are, if we stop and look at them.’
Dr John Martin
There’s a creek only 500 metres from the bubbler, so the cockatoos probably weren’t sipping the bubbler’s water for survival. The researchers think they might just be having fun; animals attracted to novelty and innovation are more likely to thrive in the mean streets of cities.
But even if the bubbler-drinking is a game for now, the behaviour could one day prove crucial for the survival of urban cockatoos.
“In those periods of drought, the creek might dry up, the ponds might actually be really stagnant. So it absolutely is a strategy that they can exploit, by having this knowledge,” Martin said.
It’s similar to research from Mexico City that showed urban sparrows had started building nests with cigarette butts.
The cockatoos’ next target: children’s lunches.Credit: Nick Moir
The chemicals leaching from the butts had an antiparasitic effect, so chicks in the nicotine-spiked nests grew up healthier. The birds used the butts by chance and then learnt they offered an advantage, so now nesting sparrows seek out cigarettes.
“In a similar way, the cockatoo didn’t start out to have a fresh water source. It may have started out from play. But now it’s led to this opportunity for an additional resource if there’s drought,” Martin said.
As well as flipping bin lids and drinking from bubblers, cockatoos may have also learnt to unzip children’s schoolbags and eat their lunch, according to reports from the citizen science app Big City Birds. Is there something special about Sydney’s super-smart cockatoos?
“Sydney isn’t special,” Martin said. “It’s just that we’re looking. There are fascinating and novel things happening in the natural world no matter where you are, if we stop and look at them.”
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