hckrnws

I have a male Barraband (Superb) parrot [1] and he can scroll videos on Youtube, select the ones with birds in and play those. People are in disbelief when the bird starts watching bird videos on his tablet. His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours. I would love for him to be able to call other birds, he is smart enough to be able to pull that off right now.

I have noticed some new behaviours recently:

1. If I'm eating the bird will beg me for food. I have been able to get him to try any foods that he sees me eating.

2. My bird has a high demand for proteins, which he gets somewhat in nuts (limited due to fats) and he will steal meat whenever possible. The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.

3. He now makes a wider variety of noises, far beyond any video I have seen of his species. I believe he is trying to replicate human speech and gets close in tone. We talk to him regularly and I think he tries to talk back.

Anybody else experience strange behaviours with their birds?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superb_parrot

>His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours.

Are you worried if you give him excessive screen time he won't be able to focus on his studies or something? ;-)

(Cute story, thanks for sharing.)

Slightly off topic but somewhat related I've heard of a person (Richard Campbell, can be heard on the podcasts "Dot Net Rocks" or "Run as radio") who taught his parrot to use his voice to control the light at it's cage. The surprising result was that it became obvious that it wanted to go to bed earlier than they thought. It turned off the lights much earlier than the timer had before it gained control and would shut it off again directly if a human turned in on again.

You be good. I love you.

https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/

Corvids, parrots are extremely intelligent. How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.

If you can do grab a copy of Alex and Me.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3018307-alex-me

That was great, thank you for sharing.

If you liked that story, you should really read the full anthology, called Exhalation. Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and there are a lot of great stories in that book. I think my favorite was The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate.

Pleasure's all mine. It's one of my favourite short stories.

Maybe they can take over twitter.com, now that it’s unused.

> others would want to show another bird their toys

Reminds me of what some people who worked at a facility that took in parrots and similar animals whose owners couldn’t care for them.

They described the birds as little kids, except they can fly and have powerful beaks. Some of them have very strong "destructive" urges too / they want to take everything apart and so on.

I have great respect for anyone who does this type of work.

Far too many people acquire animals that they aren't able or willing to take proper care of, and parrots have very long lives.

Agreed, I respect those folks a lot, not exactly a high paying job / seems like a very personal calling kinda job.

They also get to know the birds in a very personal way it seemed. One bird was "upset" with one of the handlers so she didn't want to participate when we met the birds that day. Apparently that handler had broken up a fight between upset bird and another that morning. Upset bird took that personally.

At the same time upset bird didn't want to miss out on meeting everyone so she came along with two other birds who met us.... upset bird just sorts of sat on the periphery and made sure that everyone knew she wasn't participating. She wanted folks to know she was there, but was not going to perform.

It wouldn't be hard to set up a service like this experiment so birds can socialize whenever they wanted.

> They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird

And I really hate to bring AI into it, but "bird chat bot" doesn't seem too hard to train on a bunch of behaviors for live interaction. It could offer a palette of avatars.

In the past I had parakeets and lovebirds. I think the app is great, but my first (joking) reaction was "Now let's setup a control group by putting the tablet in selfie-mode to simulate a mirror".

Feels like they need to develop a parrot-friendly input device and a little automation to complete the call.

...and that might even yield a better product for humans :)

Crows are pretty smart, I befriended one after offering it cashews daily as I would sit in my patio working on my laptop. Now he pecks on my keyboard to generate code with AI to resolve simple Jira tickets.

I was on a zoom call with a colleague and we were both WFH. His dog started barking, which made my dog start barking as well.

Not sure if they were conveying any information to each other, but they seemed to enjoy it.

“I’m here!”

“I’m over here!”

I was reading some scholarly work on raven calls. It got into a ton of detail, but it opened with the notion that the fundamental message of every call is "here I am". There were often other messages on top of that (e.g., "here I am near a hawk", "here I am near food", etc), but somehow I'd never realized that was always the base.

Not being snarky - most social media content is also essentially someone saying “here I am!” (Near a beach, near food). Maybe ravens share some existential angst with humans. Or maybe they are just more physically spread out and need to keep in touch.

There was a gag from Gary Larson depicting the inventor of dog-to-human language translator: he walked on a street where dogs were all shouting, "Hey! Hey!".

...Found it: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...

I wonder whether they used a mirror or simple recordings as baseline

Very cool! But was the video client open source?

https://kottke.org/11/10/richard-stallmans-rider

Finally - a good use for technology!

Social networks for birds:

Bird Roulette

BeakBook

CagedIn

Instasquawk

And ……….. Twitter

OnlyFan[tail pigeon]s.

OnlyFeathers was right there!

This made my day, thanks!

I worry the next step will be to create a social media site for parrots and then they will be just as lonely and angry as we humans.

Parrots communicate in a realm of which we can suppose that the possibility for the expression of gratuitous stupidity is limited.

--

There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part of that realm:

> The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior - at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls

Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions are interpolated by an assistant.

That would feel dystopian for a human: at the first sign of emotion, your browser tab closes

At the first sign of harmful interaction / insults / threats, your browser tab closes

I wish this concept would develop a little more nuance, there's a lot of good that happens via social media and we can maybe separate that from the somewhat perverse incentives social media companies foist upon people to become valuable.

There's a lot of good that happens via internet communication, social media is inherently toxic.

Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection, and what that leads to.

Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully) being on them.