Anyway the way it works is that the birds are shown other parrots on a device like an iPad and taught a series of behaviors. They learn to ring a bell when they want to chat. They are then shown a series of images of other participating birds, from which they select another bird to call. The call is placed and the birds then interact over video.
Once the birds learned the system they began asking to call their feathered friends. A lot.
They seemed to enjoy it and stayed focused on the screen. They tracked their partners around the screen; but they did sometimes look behind the device when their partner disappeared from the screen. sometimes they mirrored each other's behavior, for example grooming together. Some developed "friends" that they wanted to chat with over and over again, even sleeping with their friends sleeping on the screen.
I find the differing degrees to which animals will interact with video screens fascinating. I've never known a dog that would pay a video image any mind; visual stimuli of that sort just don't seem to resonate with them without smell and the missing wavelengths of sound. Cats are variable; none of my cats has ever watched television, but I have seen others stare at fish or birds on the screen.
In general this probably has to do with how visual the animal is; parrots are after all highly visual animals. As you would expect from this metric, some monkeys watch television and seem to enjoy it. But some refuse to take an interest.
I find myself very curious what will happen if people bring parrots who have gotten to know each other over video together.
1 comment:
I thought this article was fascinating, too. It also made me wonder about the ethics of keeping social animals as solitary pets. Someone recently mentioned to me the book, What Dogs Want, and said it turns out, "Mostly, they want other dogs."
I don't think cat people like me are immune from this. Cats aren't pack animals, but they do seem to have social lives in the wild, and exhibit some affiliative behaviors (including the famous bringing things to their humans, whatever that's about).
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