Can birds dance?

The sense of rhythm and music is innate to us. But parrot birds are also surprisingly musical, as the example of “Snowball” shows. The cockatoo made famous by YouTube spontaneously dances to different pieces of music. He masters a variety of complex dance movements and adapts his “moves” to the respective music. The bird shows a behavior that is very rare to see in the animal world, the researchers say.

Cockatoos always surprise with astonishing abilities: The clever parrots can crack locks, reason logically and make tools for themselves. In addition, they master the little game – and are even musical. For example, the palm cockatoos native to Australia produce drum solos to impress their females and keep the pace consistently. The crested cockatoo “Snowball” proved that the animals can dance ten years ago: it became a star on the video platform YouTube because it moved rhythmically to a song by the Backstreet Boys. But apparently the bird has more moves in store than it did at the time. Shortly after “Snowball” became famous and even attracted the attention of researchers, he began to expand his dance repertoire.

Amazingly diverse moves

As its owner reports, the cockatoo suddenly danced to other pieces of music. He showed astonishingly diverse movement patterns that went far beyond the previously seen head rocking and lifting feet. Without having been trained, the bird had developed its very own dance style with various elements and always seemed to try new movements. One day, to find out more about the cockatoo’s dance repertoire, Joanne Jao Keehn from San Diego State University and her colleagues filmed him dancing. For their study, the scientists “Snowball” played two hits from the 1980s: “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. How would the bird react to the music? Overall, “Snowball” heard every song three times and was encouraged to dance by its owner with praising words – however, no movements were demonstrated.

The analyzes of the film sequences revealed a surprisingly diverse repertoire of dance moves: the research team documented a total of 14 clearly distinguishable movements and two combined moves. “Snowball” bobs its head or moves it in a circle, lifts its feet in different ways or rocks its upper body back and forth. In between, he also poses in real poses, in which he remains for a short time. A so-called body role is also part of his repertoire – a wave from the head seems to move through the entire body, as the scientists report. Unlike people, “Snowball” did not dance continuously in the test, but only three to four seconds at a time – and started again after a short break.

Only parrots and humans dance like this

“The most interesting thing for us is the incredible variety of his movements,” explains co-author Aniruddh Patel from Tufts University in Medford. Every time “Snowball” heard a certain melody, it moved a little differently. According to the research team, this testifies to flexibility and possibly even creativity. With its reactions to music, the cockatoo shows behavior that was long considered the domain of humans. Sea lions can also bob to the beat and cats and chimpanzees can develop preferences for certain types of music and rhythms. Dancing with the participation of different body parts and a variety of movement patterns – but that doesn’t even apply to monkeys closely related to humans. “It is a characteristic that has only been observed in parrots so far – ‘snowball’ is not the only bird with such skills,” report Keehn and her colleagues.

They suspect that the parrots’ dance talent is promoted by a number of innate skills – for example, vocal learning and imitation of movements or learning complex activity patterns, but also the tendency to form long-term social bonds. “Parrots share all of these qualities with humans. This could explain why so far only humans and parrots have shown spontaneous and diverse dance movements to music, ”the team concluded.

(Video: Cell Press)

Source: Joanne Jao Keehn (San Diego State University) et al., Current Biology, doi: 10.1016 / j.cub.2019.05.035

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