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?
The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.
Oh and my 12yo bourk's parakeet really like chicken and madly love poutine. Its so funny seeing her taking a bite of French fries followed by a bite of cheese.
Deer, horses, etc will do the same to small mammals and birds.
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.)
The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
Its even psychologically addicting for birds.
Basically i wouldn’t call a starving man begging for scraps “addicted”. They just have an unfulfilled need. They found a way to fulfill that need (more or less) and they are pursuing what they found to work for them. This might be bothersome for the keepers of course, but it is not the bird who choose to become their captive pet.
(I want to emphasise here that I assume that the commenter is a lovely, dedicated, bird-loving person who provides a large flock of friends to their parrots and all the enrichement they can think of and money can buy. This is not a comment on them doing anything wrong. Simply an observation that there are some parrots whose needs are neight impossible to fully meet in captivity.)
If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
> If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.
He eats well (and varied), sleeps well, socialises with other birds and he plays games with us too. He hasn't got feather loss and he's not getting into weird psychotic behaviours. He has certain routines in his day where he waits for example to be let out in the morning and he puts himself back into his cage.
I will say that when you eat near him, he gets excited and seems to be begging (or demanding) food. And when I say "aggressive" with mobile phones, I mean that he lands on you and pecks you (not nearly at full force) until you put on something he wants to watch. It's still not clear to me if it's addiction or just basic need.
Do you lock him up when this happens? I care for a bird, if it acts out when we let it roam, we lock it up the next day and it has quickly learned to enjoy it's limited freedom.
I should say that he generally behaves himself, but a little like a child, sometimes he is in "that mood" and is almost looks for trouble.
He also cycles through a pattern (probably for attracting a mate) and it gets more and more complex as time goes on. He keeps adding to the noises and pattern, but it's very predictable.
My parrot is interested in my dog though and has picked up of few of my dog’s training commands. He started to say the release command for when my dog sits for his meals so now I get my parrot to use the command on cue, and get the bird to release the dog (and the dog gets dinner and he gets a treat).
If I’m giving attention to my dog, he sometimes wants to come and sit with us on the couch and get some pets himself. He also used to like to drop food for my older dog (who passed), but my younger dog isn’t a huge fan of vegetables so the bird stopped doing it. If my dog seems like he wants to go out the bird will say “you wanna go out?”But most of the time they kind of just ignore each other.
His language is very situational. When I uncover his cage in the morning, he says good morning, when I leave for work or to go out, he says goodbye. He makes water pouring sounds when I pour water, and call himself a good bird when he knows he’s done something good, or say ‘mmmm’ when I’ve given something he likes. He’ll say “wanna go out” when he wants out of his cage. He’s not overly loud for a parrot but does like to belt out some opera regularly.
He learned most of his phrases/words within his first 2-4 years, but I’ve had him for 6 now and he’ll add a new word/phrase into his vocabulary from time to time.
My bird also loves high protein and fatty foods (nuts and coconuts). I’ve never really allowed him to eat my food, but more recently he’s become interested in any food that I’m eating that he knows he’s allowed to have (nuts or popcorn etc), and will say “hello” over and over until I’ve gotten him his unsalted versions of them. I make him do tricks for them usually and that keeps him pretty polite about it. He’s a pretty big bird at 17”.
He used to be a lot more adventurous about food, but he knows what he likes now and usually sticks to his favorites. He also likes to dip each of his kibbles into his water before eating them.
I’ve never expected to get a parrot, but he sort of dropped in my lap and I rescued him. These parrots live as long as humans, so it’s quite the commitment. But he’s a very smart and sweet boi and he’s managed to charm his way into my life.
My parrot is very particular about food, but will try most things. He likes his sweetcorn cooked, peas cooked, carrot uncooked, etc. He also drops dog food down to the dogs and watches the dogs eating it, and then likes to eat some of the dog food himself (the dog food is mixed with boiling water and cooled so that it is more soggy). He has also successfully trained a young budgie to copy him.
We try not to feed him too many fats. He has access to seeds all of the time, sometimes we put millet in the cage, and occasionally we break up peanuts for him. He is rather partial to a cashew, but they are very fatty. He's not a big bird and smaller birds have more trouble with fats.
He's about 1 year now and seems to be sexually mature, we're hoping we can get him to either do tricks or talk, but not sure about how to train him.
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.
There is a pretty clear double standard there.
Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses.
If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.
One factor is neuron size. Bird neurons are around 0.4 the length of mammalian neurons, so you can pack in around 8 times the neurons in a given volume.
A large parrot has the same number of neurons as a medium sized dog.
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.
Far too many people acquire animals that they aren't able or willing to take proper care of, and parrots have very long lives.
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.
> 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.
So to scale, hmm. Visual sentiment analysis of parrots. Parrot-accessibility. And... some kind of chaperone role... Is there a name for UX design which prioritizes non-negativity of experience over task completion and not leaving? Note that parrot-centered design may have unfamiliar properties, like say, stronger association with the physical location of the device, which say might then require a second device elsewhere to emulate a hypothetical "I'm avoiding you and going away to hang with friends" flock UX.
Not sure if they were conveying any information to each other, but they seemed to enjoy it.
“I’m over here!”
...Found it: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
[1] Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877086/
Bird Roulette
BeakBook
CagedIn
Instasquawk
And ……….. Twitter
So this works with parrots, unlike dogs who have two color cones and wouldn't see very well on the screen.
https://chatgpt.com/share/681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07...
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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.
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.
Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-toxic because of all the levers also required to make it profitable via engagement.
It's very hard to distinguish social media from the algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-example, but we're now in a place where the audience demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.
Parents have written of setting up a local minecraft server for kids, and their friends, a neighborhood, or a school. Is setting up a local social media server also a thing?
More commonly people are using groupchats on WhatsApp, Discord, or Slack for this... it's easier than maintaining it yourself (but there are also plenty of self-host options for chat networks too).
