Scientists find male birds performing alone with small sticks before female audience, with calls, periodic blushing, and raising feathers on their crests

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Researchers have captured the first footage of cockatoos bashing out drum solos with little sticks and seedpods in what are believed to be musical displays to impress the opposite sex.

Scientists took the extraordinary footage after stalking the shy and elusive Cape York palm cockatoos for seven years through the unspoilt wilderness of the peninsula in far north Queensland.

The recordings show 18 males knocking out more than 130 drum solos which sometimes start with a flourish and nearly always contain a signature pattern distinct to each bird.

Most of the musical outbursts were performed in front of females, apparently to win them over, with males embellishing their drumming efforts with calls, periodic blushing, and raising the feathers on their crests.

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Robert Heinsohn at the Australian National University in Canberra and others witnessed the birds tweaking sticks and seedpods before banging out sequences of 27 to 92 beats long. The birds varied their repertoires immensely to include rapid strikes less than a tenth of a second apart, to more casual taps repeated every few seconds.

Writing in the journal, Science Advances, the researchers suggest that the spectacle points to common ground between the parrots’ percussive antics and the more accomplished works of Keith Moon, Charlie Watts and Phil Collins.

“We show that drumming by palm cockatoos shares the key rudiments of human instrumental music, including manufacture of a sound tool, performance in a consistent context, regular beat production, repeated components, and individual styles,” the scientists write.

They add that the birds “appear to be more like solo musical artists or the beat setters of musical ensembles, for example drummers in western rock bands, who have their own internalised notion of a regular pulse, and then generate the motor pattern that creates the beat”.

The behaviour is all the more remarkable, the researchers claim, because in other animal species tool manufacture is rare and almost always connected to foraging for food.