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Post by LaFille on May 9, 2009 1:24:30 GMT
Video presentation: The movie shows three excerpts of videos analyzed in this experiment. Each excerpt is at a tempo different from the original song (Everybody, by the Backstreet Boys; 108.7 beats per minute [bpm]). The excerpts include synchronized bouts, periods during which Snowball bobs his head in synchrony with the musical beat for at least 12 consecutive bobs.
Current Biology 19(10), published online April 30, 2009. There's a neat interview with complete videos of cockatoos' dancing skills on the Discovery News blog Born Animal here: Birds Can Dance, Video and Q&A with Harvard's Adena Schachner. Interesting and funny. ;D |
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Post by The Sonar Chicken on May 9, 2009 10:01:54 GMT
That was very neat. ;D
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Post by Hand-E-Food on May 9, 2009 23:56:30 GMT
That's cool! I love how he even goes side-to-side at the end of it. By the way, that's a cockatoo, not a parrot. |
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Post by Galadriel on May 11, 2009 22:10:06 GMT
It's indeed a cockatoo, but dang, I wish that bird was mine! Lovely how he dances to the beat!
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Post by LaFille on May 12, 2009 3:30:51 GMT
The study was about the bird family, though that's only cockatoos that are shown in the videos I linked to. There are videos of other species of parrots dancing on YouTube and related articles as well. One of the things that the study highlighted in particular was that there would be a link between the capacity to dance to the beat and the capacity of vocal learning/mimicry. That opens interesting questions and perspectives, discussed in the blog I linked to in the 1st post. |
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Post by Galadriel on May 13, 2009 0:50:47 GMT
Any bird of the Parrot family are very smart beings. They can imitate almost any sound, remember a lot of things, even link words and sounds to events, like "hello" when someone comes in, or "goodbye" when that someone leaves. They can also become very sad when they got not enough attention. We once nearly bought a cockatoo that was nearly bold, he pulled out his own feathers cuz he was lonely. The owner of the pet shop adviced us not to buy him though.
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Post by LaFille on May 14, 2009 3:35:58 GMT
Getting a parrot as pet seems to be a very big commitment; I was about to write engagement, but all in all it could have been on spot too. ;D It's not only that they're very intelligent (intelligence isn't always a blessing for the owner if the pet is stubborn or destructive) or emotionally demanding, but they live for very long too... The owner of Snowball (the dancing cockatoo in the vids) owns a rescue for such birds when the owners can't/don't want to keep theirs; IIRC that cockatoo was one of those.
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