Most of the cockies have left the Hobart suburbs with the start of spring, taking mischief and mayhem with them.
I’m always sorry to see the big flocks go at the start of September, heading to their happy hunting grounds in country districts.
The antics of the sulphur-crested cockatoos keep me entertained during the sombre winter months, along with admiring their beautiful display of colour, mixing the yellow of their crests with the pure–white of their bodies.
Not everyone loves cockies, however. I have heard complaints over the years of them damaging roofs by chewing the wooden eaves of homes – presumably to sharpen beaks – and plundering food from late-bearing fruit and nut trees in gardens.
But It’s hardly the war between humans and cockies that has been reported in recent weeks from the mainland.
It appears the cockies of Sydney have not only developed a taste for human food placed in wheelie-bins, they have also developed strategies to get the better of people trying to keep the food out of their reach.
Cockatoos and humans are in fact locked in what researchers describe as “an interspecies innovation arms race” in which humans and cockatoos try to outwit each other.
Sydney residents are resorting to increasingly sophisticated measures to prevent sulphur-crested cockatoos from opening and raiding household wheelie bins, detailed in new research published in the journal Current Biology.
Attracted by food waste, the highly intelligent parrots use their beaks and manoeuvre themselves to swing bin lids open.
The study, led by Dr Barbara Klump of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany, has documented 52 combinations of techniques used by humans to deter the birds from their bin-raiding antics. In a census of 3283 bins across four Sydney suburbs, Dr Klump’s team noted that more than half of the bins had protection mechanisms in place.
The most basic cockatoo deterrent was the use of a brick to weigh down a lid but as one survey respondent reported: “Bricks worked for a while, but cockies found a way to heave them off.”
The researchers say what makes the stand-off interesting is that two separate species are learning changes in behaviour to counter each other.
The challenge for humans was to secure the bins in a way that still allowed them to be opened and emptied by garbage trucks.
One resident had success by wedging an old running shoe in the hinge of the bin lid which allowed it to open when lifted by the garbage truck, but applied too much pressure for the cockies to attack it themselves.
Parrots along with crows are some of the most intelligent creatures on the planet. Their large brain size and their sociability have allowed them to adapt to living with humans. And it looks like in this arms race, humans are adapting to live with cockatoos.