I have been watching a cockatoo eat jacaranda nuts in the backyard. It got me wondering. Sometimes the cockatoo drops the nut pods before he has eaten all the nuts in it. I assume he drops them accidentally. It doesn't matter for this cockatoo. There are plenty more pods for him to grab and he does. For other cockatoos sometimes there probably aren't so many pods.
I wonder if you could measure a cockatoo's ability to concentrate on what it is doing by seeing if they dropped fewer pods when pods weren't in such abundance. Humans are like that. The scarcity of something makes us treat it more preciously. Do you think cockatoos would be the same?
Depends on whether the cockatoo is capable of judging the abundance of nuts.
Willem / 5:59pm / 6 November 2007
I suppose that is one of the questions. But I would be inclined to think that cockatoos would be pretty good at that. I’ve read things which suggest that birds can work out what areas have lots of food and somehow communicate that to other birds.
Ryan / 10:49pm / 6 November 2007