Last month when we talked about Ronan, the disco-loving sea lion who’s shown scientists how animals can keep a beat, the reporting noted that cockatoos have long been known for their beat-tacular moves. I said at the time, “Call a bird a ‘cockatoo,’ expect a dancing queen.” Well, turns out that feeling the music is not the only thing Cacatuidae are good at. In 2018, a behavioral ecologist named Barbara Klump observed some of the birds drinking from a public water fountain in a Sydney, Australia suburb. At first she thought there was a glitch and the water was just running on its own. But then she spun her chance sighting into a full-blown research project and the results were conclusive: the birds had figured out how to operate the handle to make the water spout. And apparently, it’s become a whole social scene for the cockatoos, with bunches of them lining up on a nearby fence waiting to get their turn. Thankfully, for science and the world, we have video footage of this momentous breakthrough for birdkind.

Now, after monitoring cockatoos with wildlife cameras placed near one drinking fountain in Sydney’s western suburbs, Klump and her research team have confirmed that the birds regularly do this in local parks—something local wildlife experts also told her, per the New York Times.

Over 44 days, the team recorded nearly 14 hours of the cockatoos around the fountain. The birds made 525 drinking attempts, of which 41 percent were successful. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Biology Letters.

Turning on the water fountains takes skill, so it makes sense that not all attempts worked out. To quench their thirst, the birds would place one foot on the fountain’s stem and the other on the spring-loaded handle, twisting it clockwise by leaning their body weight.

“It’s a bit of an awkward body position they have to hold, but it’s pretty impressive,” says Lucy Aplin, an ecologist at the Australian National University and a study co-author, to Peter de Kruijff at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The researchers don’t yet understand why the birds go through the effort of maneuvering the fountains when there are easily accessible streams and creeks nearby. At the fountains, meanwhile, the cockatoos will wait for as long as ten minutes to get a turn to drink. “They appear to be quite willing to queue for a considerable amount of time,” Aplin says to Science News’ Jake Buehler.

One possibility is that the birds have gotten a taste for the purer water coming from the fountains, explains Klump to Jack Tamisiea at Science. Or, the birds may prefer the height of the fountain, as drinking from a ground source leaves them less able to see predators like eagles and falcons.

…For now, the fountain drinking behavior hasn’t spread widely among Sydney’s cockatoos. The researchers looked through the citizen science platform Big City Birds, but they didn’t find any evidence of the behavior happening outside of the western suburbs. That’s unlike the species’ trash bin-opening habit, which has inconvenienced homeowners across at least 44 different suburbs.

Residents in Brisbane, Australia, however, have also spotted cockatoos drinking from water fountains, Aplin says to the New York Times. The birds don’t migrate, so the two populations couldn’t have learned the behavior from each other. This suggests there’s potential for the “independent invention of the behavior and local spread in other places,” Aplin adds.

[From Smithsonian Magazine]

“The researchers don’t yet understand why the birds go through the effort of maneuvering the fountains when there are easily accessible streams and creeks nearby.” Hey, why shouldn’t cockatoos keep themselves abreast of the latest technology?! I’m sure the wheel didn’t seem all that logical when our ancient ancestor invented it, and people in all the neighboring caves were grumbling, “Why bother maneuvering that stupid thing when you can schlep everything on your back!” But look where that wheel got us! To today, and the colossal mess we’ve made as stewards of this planet. Which is why I’m thanking our lucky feathers that these intrepid cockatoos have mastered public water fountains; it shows they have the intelligence to someday take the reins from us. Just think what a wonderful world this would be, if it were run by cockatoos: funaklicious hairdos, water worship (and access!), and days spent dancing to the beat. I could dig it.

Photos credit: Roman Odinstov and Dominik Lack on Pexels and via YouTube