Two years ago, we brought you the story of Figaro, a Goffin's cockatoo that lived at a research center in Vienna. These birds don't use tools in the wild—Figaro's minders even argue that the cockatoo's curved beak makes tool use rather difficult for them.

But Figaro's environment, which features lots of wired mesh, apparently drove him to some novel behaviors. He was observed splitting off splinters from wooden material, and the bird used them to retrieve objects (generally food or toys) that were on the wrong side of the wire. Figaro was making tools.

Tool use had been seen in a number of birds, so this in itself wasn't entirely radical. But the researchers involved realized that it presented a fantastic opportunity to learn how tool use spreads in birds and what that tells us about their inherent mental capacities. Now, two years on, they're back with a description of how, when given the chance, Figaro has started a bit of a social revolution.

For the experiments themselves, researchers set up a box with a wire mesh across the front and placed a treat out of the birds' reach inside. Next to the box, they set out a collection of sticks, each long enough to reach the treat. Left on their own, other cockatoos never retrieved any of the treats inside (Figaro obviously excepted).

The birds were divided into two sets of six birds, three each of males and females. The control group got to witness manipulations where magnets either brought the treat to the edge of the mesh or manipulated a stick to push the treat towards them. The experimental group was allowed to watch Figaro grab a tool and get to work. After the demonstrations, the birds were given time with the tools and box to see if they'd retrieve the food.

At first, nothing happened. But after four or five demonstration sessions, the males of the experimental group began to catch on. They didn't exactly mimic Figaro's approach—he tended to rake the food closer, while the others tended to use the stick as a lever to flick the food to the edge of the cage—but they definitely began to obtain the treat. None of the females picked up the habit.

The tool use was also delightfully idiosyncratic. Sometimes the birds would lose a tool, leaving it out of reach inside the cage. In that case, they'd reach for another tool but wouldn't use it to retrieve the food—instead, they'd retrieve the first tool, then use that to get the food. One individual went three layers deep into this sort of recursion.

Once tool use was established among these three cockatoos, two were given a new challenge: the box was presented along with a block of wood, rather than a set of tools. (The third, Pipin, had started to pair with his mate and was left out of these studies.) In these experiments, one of the males spontaneously started making tools by pulling splinters off the block of wood after just a few sessions. The third only needed to see Figaro perform a single tool manufacturing demo before he also picked up the habit.

The results suggest that learning tool creation is much easier than learning tool use, at least once the utility of a tool had been demonstrated. The reason for the difference between the sexes isn't clear, although the authors note that the size of the group was so small they can't rule out random chance. Assuming it's a real effect, they suggest it may be a matter of a difference in unrelated behaviors; males provide food to nesting females, and so they may be more thorough in their foraging.

But the real insights may be into the cognitive facilities underlying tool use. The authors explain it as well as anyone possibly could:

The use and manufacture of tools are often assumed to be associated with sophisticated cognitive traits. Today, we know that this generalization is not valid, as tool use sometimes involves stereotyped, more or less inherited motor patterns which are not adaptable to novel circumstances, and hence do not seem to demand complex cognitive processing.

That's pretty clearly not the case here. This behavior is not normally seen in Goffin's cockatoos, and it was only picked up after repeated observations. Perhaps more significantly, the behavior wasn't merely imitated; instead, the birds appeared to get the concept of using tools following Figaro's demonstration and developed their own, distinctive method of manipulating them. Finally, they were able to extrapolate the approach to things other than the treat, as made clear when they used a tool to retrieve a previously lost one.

The authors suggest that the ability to learn socially also relies on some pretty sophisticated cognitive underpinnings, as they must see their fellow cockatoos as distinct from other objects and then recognize that the other's behaviors can be applied by themselves. In these cockatoos, the researchers just might have stumbled on to a group that lets them explore what they term "comparative cognition and the evolution of culture."

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2014. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0972 (About DOIs).