Sulphur-crested cockatoos raiding wheelie bins are (annoying) examples of animal behavioural adaptation

The sulphur-crested cockatoo has recently attracted international attention — and its own moniker — the "jerk bird".

From there the cockie melodramatically throws tin foil and plastics, biscuit boxes and roast chicken bags up and out of the bin while other individuals wait around and rip everything apart.

It makes a heck of a mess, but these behaviours, seen by some as pesky, might actually be an example of animal technical innovation and cultural transmission that's new to science.

They could be so significant that a team of researchers from Germany have been spending months in Sydney's suburbs studying the sulphur-crested larrikins.

The cockies have been spotted eating bones, and even a ham sandwich, according to Barbara Klump, a specialist researcher in bird behaviour and tool use from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour.

"They're very explorative, very interested in everything, quite destructive, and I can totally see that they like the different textures, and the noise that it makes and just ripping things out," Dr Klump said.

Bin raiding is a good example of how they use their brains and behavioural flexibility to access new resources, said Lucy Aplin from the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology, who's leading the Clever Cockie Project.

"It's a resource they're using to allow them to exist in these areas. And I think it's pretty amazing they've managed to do this," Dr Aplin said.

"It's annoying if it's your bins, but it's also an amazing example of behavioural adaptation."

And while bin cockies might be a relatively new phenomenon, it's clear that cockies have had a big impact on Australian cultural life for a very long time.

In 1988, the "sulphur-crested gang" caused some $50,000 worth of damage to the roof of the National Herbarium of New South Wales in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens.

The cockies' rooftop antics caused rain to leak into the herbarium vault where millions of dollars' worth of botanical specimens were kept.

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They also picked apart a new apartment building in the inner suburb of Rozelle in 2006, after the builders used rendered styrofoam for the building decorations. Apparently once they figured out how delicious the foam felt beneath their sharp beaks, the whole area was raining styrofoam bits like snow.

Similarly, in the Sydney CBD they hollowed out a styrofoam building facade so much they could clomp around inside it and take shelter from inclement weather.

This sort of exploratory chewing habits put urban birds in the firing line, literally, with cockies being shot in the middle of Sydney after they chewed the facade of a UniLodge building in 2010.

Even national infrastructure projects are of no consequence to the cockatoos, which apparently chewed through $80,000 of broadband network cables in 2017.

Copycat cockie behaviour persists for generations

Their habits are so much more than a menace to the information superhighway or the local tidy town title.

The reason this German-based research team is here in suburban Australia is because this bin-opening could be the perfect new example of animal cultural transmission.

"Animal culture is behaviour which is shared by members of a population that is acquired through social learning — from copying another individual in the group — and the behaviour persists over generations," Dr Aplin said.

"The best example of animal culture that we have actually comes from work done in chimpanzees, which started with Jane Goodall, who found that tools and tool behaviour vary across chimpanzee populations in Africa.

"Young chimpanzees learn how to use tools from their mothers and this leads to local variance in this tool use behaviour.

"So it might just seem like a bit of a bit of a oddity, but actually we think it can be potentially really important because it allows populations to show locally adaptive behaviour that doesn't depend on their genes or on traditional Darwinian evolution."

Who's a clever bird?

Proving how behaviours like the bubbler drinking or bin opening spreads is part of the focus of Dr Klump's research.

Dr Klump said it became immediately obvious that not all cockies can open bins — it's a skill that a select few in the population actually have.

So how, and why, did those individuals learn it?

By putting painted markers on a flock of cockies, Dr Klump takes detailed observations of their interactions with each other.

"Every 10 minutes, I'm recording who is here, and with this data we can build social networks, so basically we can find out who the cockies hang out with, who their friends are, who their social circles are," she said.

Source | ABC