Few species in the animal kingdom have been observed to move in rhythmic fashion to music. Is dancing a human impulse? Not necessarily. A now famous viral video shows a cockatoo called Snowball busting a collection of classic shapes along to the Backstreet Boys’ Everybody (Backstreet’s Back). Merely a training trick, with a bowl of bird treats just out of shot? Watch the video and you’ll see Snowball isn’t just swaying – he’s perfectly in time.

As the website Phys.org notes, the video found its way to the desk of psychology professor Aniruddh Patel, who contacted Snowball’s owner, herself a scientist. The pair of them then played Snowball a variety of songs, some of them sped up or slowed down, and found that nine times out of 11 he was able to keep in time. "It turned out to be the first demonstration that another animal could feel the beat of music and move its body to it," says Patel.

It gets even more interesting. The same mental processes that make birds like the cockatoo – and the African grey parrot – so good at mimicking speech are also thought to be crucial to the ability to react to music. Adena Schachner, a psychology doctoral candidate at Harvard, studied footage of animals reacting to music, both vocal mimickers like parrots as well as cats and dogs.

"The really important point is that many animals showed really strong evidence of synchronizing with the music, but they were all vocal mimics," says Schachner. "Most of them were parrots – we found 14 different species of parrot on YouTube that showed convincing evidence that they could keep a beat."

So, it’s possible that the ability to mimic speech and keep time to a beat may be part of the same evolutionary process – just as it may have been with humans, though the idea obviously needs more study.

If music be the food of love…