Wild Parrots Use Tools to Snack on Calcium-Filled Shells

It turns out wild parrots may actually use tools. Scientists have found new evidence that vasa parrots use a novel technique to acquire calcium from seashells.

In this case, the birds grab the calcium by using small pebbles or date pits to grind calcium powder from the shells or to break off small pieces of shell to ingest. This behavior, never before seen in this species, is the first evidence of a nonhuman using tools for grinding. It's also one of the few reports of nonhuman animals sharing tools directly.

The researchers saw that the birds had more interest in shells from March to mid-April, just before the breeding season. This may be due to the fact that calcium supplementation is critical for egg-laying. Researchers were therefore initially surprised to find that it was the males, and not the females, who showed the greatest interest in the shells.

So why was this? The researchers found that the males often fed the females before copulating with them. This may explain why the males were more interested in gaining the calcium from the shells.

"The use of tools by nonhuman animals remains an exceedingly rare phenomenon," said Megan Lambert, one of the researchers, in a news release. "These observations provide new insights into the tool-using capabilities of parrots and give rise to further questions as to why this species uses tools. Tool use could reflect an innate predisposition in the parrots, or it could be the result of individual trial and error learning or some form of social learning. Whether these birds also use tools in the wild remains to be explored, but ultimately these observations highlight the greater vasa parrot as a species of interest for further studies of physical cognition."

The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.

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