“There are examples of other parrots making diverse movements to music on the internet, but Snowball is the first to be studied scientifically in this regard,” Professor Patel said.īut because dancing is not useful to a wild parrot, it’s probably an evolutionary consequence of something else - something that’s common to humans and parrots, but is not shared by humans and great apes. “We found preliminary evidence that Snowball dances differently to the two different songs, but we would need to collect more data to confirm this,” Professor Patel added in email.īut where did these new moves come from? Was Snowball actually mimicking human dancing - even though human and parrot bodies look so very different? Or were these new dance moves a sign of Snowball’s behavioral flexibility - and perhaps even his creativity? Either situation would be “remarkable”, the authors write. The team noted that Snowball’s dance movements were clearly intentional, but weren’t an efficient means for him to achieve any plausible external goal. “But many of the moves we see in this study are things nobody has ever reported in the wild in terms of cockatoo behavior.” “Certainly, they do movements as part of courtship,” Professor Patel said. The research team played the two tunes three times each for a total of 23 minutes. Schulz was in the room, encouraging him to dance by occasionally shouting “good boy,” but Snowball was the only one dancing. To further quantify these diverse new movements, Professor Patel and his collaborators filmed Snowball dancing to two classic rock and roll hits from the 1980s: “Another One Bites the Dust” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” During filming, Ms. During this exploratory period, Snowball seemed to prefer movement diversity over synchronization accuracy: his rhythmic movements often were not highly synchronized to the beat, possibly because he was exploring new movements rather than exploiting old ones. Study co-author, Irena Schulz, CEO of Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service Inc, who lives with Snowball, first reported to her collaborators in 2008 that Snowball appeared to be in a period of ‘movement exploration’. “After that study we noticed him doing new movements to music that we hadn’t seen before,” Professor Patel explained. He apparently was a bit of a dance experimentalist. He was never taught to make dance moves.”Īs time went on, it became obvious that Snowball was doing more than simply repeating his original dance moves (compare the first and second videos). “He was never given a food reward for any of this. “Snowball developed this behavior spontaneously,” Professor Patel said. These animals learn to move in a certain way to gain a reward or avoid a punishment. Other animals, such as moneys and bears, have been taught to dance, these performances do displays do not qualify as true dancing because they are the result of operant conditioning. Many birds rely upon highly synchronized “dance” movements as part of courtship, but they haven’t been observed dancing to music.
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