Cunning Kea Cheeky Conniving Cognitive

Forest and Bird, Issue 300, 1 May 2001, Page 18

Cunning Kea Cheeky Conniving Cognitive

RACHEL JOHNSTON

The birc-brairecl kea Iay 0e 25 bright

:S 3] njonkkey,

finds:

epending whether or not it’s your property under inspection, the kea can appear as a cheeky comic, or a mischievous vandal. Stories abound of keadamaged tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, skis, mountain bikes, and even cars and huts. What drives this mountain parrot to behave, or misbehave, so destructively? Restricted to the South Island of New Zealand, kea are one of the few parrots in the world to include the true alpine environment in their habitat. With the proliferation of ski-fields in the Southern Alps, kea are now routinely in close contact with the myriad of items we, as an alien species, have introduced into their living space. Inquisitive by nature, the kea soon

sinks its claws and beak into any novel object including, unfortunately, things we perceive as our valuable private property. Kea, in their exploration of human objects, may primarily be seeking information. Like their lowland kin, kea are skilled at holding, manipulating and breaking objects. Behaviours such as these, or ‘exploring, may be an important part of how kea, and all parrots, investigate their environment. As humans, we may be biased towards the notion that sensory information comes from a distance — as in seeing and hearing — rather than by direct contact. Perhaps for kea, investigation is more often by direct contact: picking up _ objects, manipulating them and taking them apart. Our ski-fields probably present themselves as big alien enterprises put down in the kea’s backyard just to investigate. If a UFO landed in our own backyard, would we be content to look at it, smell it, say, ‘isn’t that an unusual foreign object’, then simply walk away? Wouldn't it be tempting to push a few buttons and turn handles?. Perhaps kea are not so different from ourselves in this regard. We may both be exceptionally inquisitive species but how do we account for the kea’s sense of curiosity?

One clue may be the kea’s omnivorous feeding habits. It may be that omnivorous animals, such as kea, must often feed opportunely. Being inquisitive by nature may give omnivorous animals an adaptive advantage. For kea, the unpredictable, often harsh, climate in the alpine environment may have put an added premium on resourcefulness. A high degree of curiosity and a capacity for resourcefulness appear to be tightly linked attributes that largely define the kea’s character. Manipulating objects is an expression of curiosity, and may partly explain the attention kea give to a wide variety of natural and human-made things. But can we be more precise? What characteristics of objects elicit manipulation (or investigatory behaviour) by kea? I examined this idea with a series of experiments in which five ‘object characteristics’ (colour, texture, pliability, complexity, and complexity combined with novelty) were varied. The experiments were presented to kea frequenting the Mt Hutt ski-field, above the Rakaia Gorge in Canterbury. This research might be viewed as an effort to understand the mind of the kea, but the rationale is partly a practical concern. An understanding of the kea’s psychological profile might hold the key to

Young kea (left) has a bright yellow eye-ring and nostrils. This may be the reason for the adult kea’s interest in the colour yellow.

understanding, and minimizing, the damage kea do to human property. My study showed that the characteristics of objects which particularly provoked investigation by kea were the colour yellow and pliability. Kea were also particularly interested in objects that were novel (i.e., not being frequently encountered) and also contained some element of complexity. It might therefore be asking for trouble to head into kea country with an original, yellow-foam ski-rack. A simply constructed, hard, green ski-rack might be a better idea. But why might some of the features of certain objects be so provocative to kea? Reasons relating to communication and feeding may provide part of the answer. For example, young kea have a bright yellow eye-ring and cere (nostrils), but as the bird matures these features darken. For kea, yellow may therefore serve as a badge, advertising the youngster’s special status to other kea. This might be the ultimate cause of kea interest in yellow. That is, over evolutionary time the ‘psychological landscape’ of kea may have been shaped to respond to yellow. An animal’s psychological landscape refers to biases that have evolved in relation to how the brain and nervous system operate, which in turn affect an animal’s response to potential signals. One explanation may be that kea are predisposed to take an interest in yellow for reasons relating to their own relationships with each other. This is not to suggest that kea investigate yellow objects at a ski-field because they mistake them for juveniles, but rather, for kea, yellow may stand out in the environment as a particularly interesting colour. I also found kea to favour a soft, pliable object over a hard object. This preference might be considered in relation to kea’s natural diet. Kea in the wild feed on a wide variety of food items, such as fruits, seeds, roots, leaves and buds, nectar, insect larvae, honeydew and occasionally meat (including carrion). There is evidence, however, that kea take a particular interest in foods that are not very fibrous or hard. Certain soft, succulent berries, such as those of Coprosoma species are a favoured food source for kea. Again, this is not to imply that kea mistake especially pliant human-made objects for a soft berry, but it is possible that kea have a psychological landscape in which these similar sensory characteristics attract attention.

There is an important, but perhaps subtle, distinction here. As with colour, attraction of kea to pliable objects may be a consequence of behaviour that originally evolved for feeding, but can lead to damage when kea encounter human-made objects with similar properties. Perhaps kea have a driving curiosity that may account for much of their behaviour, but what about intelligence? Just how smart is the kea? Is the kea’s interest in human-made objects a byproduct of intelligence? Recent studies by Irene Pepperberg on the problem-solving abilities of an African grey parrot named Alex have given new meaning to the expression ‘bird brain. This bird does not merely mimic the sound of human speech, but can carry on rudimentary conversations in English. It can also master abstract concepts such as counting, shapes and matter, and in general rivals the language skills of chimpanzees. Kea, unlike other parrots, do not have a predilection toward articulating the sounds of human speech. I chose to examine the intellectual prowess of kea in a different way. Kea were presented with opportunities to solve string-pulling problems, with cheese being the reward. Using their bill and feet, kea could pull up a string out of a clear cylindrical tube and obtain the cheese. The problem is more complex than it may sound, as the string is too long to be pulled up in one movement.

I termed the two string-pulling problems the ‘single’ and ‘double’ string pulling tasks, the latter test being a modification of an experiment formerly used to test the problem-solving ability of gibbons. In the single string-pulling task, seven out of the 19 kea tested solved the problem, six of these seven birds doing so on their first encounter. The kea’s performance on the double string-pulling test compared favourably with that of the gibbon, a primate. In fact, seven kea solved the problem in less time than the gibbons took on a similar problem. Kea completed the task in an average of 50 seconds on their first encounter. As might be expected from kea, there was considerable individuality. Successful techniques varied from bird to bird, and from trial to trial, for the same individual. For example, Split, a juvenile male, used seven different techniques to successfully obtain the cheese reward. Whenever Split saw me carrying the apparatus through the ski-field carpark he would follow in hot pursuit, head tilted and hopping about in typical kea style, as though eager for the challenge and thinking, ‘hmm, which cheese extraction

These results show that kea are very capable of solving a problem they have, presumably, never before encountered. Is this surprising? Perhaps not when we consider that kea live in a relatively harsh ‘problem-solving’ environment. The kea’s curiosity and intelligence has enabled it to adapt to a radically altered environment. It can also exploit new food-gathering opportunities, and take advantage of innovations as they arise through human agency. Maybe our ski-fields and alpine resorts, with all their associated paraphernalia, merely represent ‘invading UFOs’ to kea, providing a source of entertainment and challenge. In the scientific world, the idea that birds might rival the cognitive abilities of primates has only recently gained respectability. So, is New Zealand’s kea a genuine vandal, or some form of remarkable ‘flying primate’ with well-developed thinking skills, a sense of curiosity and adaptability? Keep these thoughts in mind next time you catch a kea interfering with your car.

RACHEL JOHNSTON studied kea behaviour for her masters degree in science.