Parrots on Video Chat

Very strange feature in the NY Times about parrots who place videocalls to each other, engineered to be as hard to share as possible. I did track down the experimental protocol for this fascinating bit of bird science here, via the web page of one of the study leaders, Rebecca Kleinberger.

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.

Not only did the birds seem to like the calls, but some owners reported that they seemed happier and more energized in general. Which raises a lot of questions about, for example, keeping social species like parrots as solo pets.

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.