The sulphur-crested cockatoo has recently attracted international attention — and its own moniker — the "jerk bird".

It's all thanks to its bin-day behaviour: one cockie stands to the side of a bin, lifts the lid then inches along the side of the bin, holding the lid in its beak or foot until it's finally able to flip the lid back.

From there the cockie melodramatically throws tin foil and plastics, biscuit boxes and roast chicken bags up and out of the bin while other individuals wait around and rip everything apart.

It makes a heck of a mess, but these behaviours, seen by some as pesky, might actually be an example of animal technical innovation and cultural transmission that's new to science.

They could be so significant that a team of researchers from Germany have been spending months in Sydney's suburbs studying the sulphur-crested larrikins.

The cockatoo bin-day menace. ( ABC: Ann Jones )

The cockies have been spotted eating bones, and even a ham sandwich, according to Barbara Klump, a specialist researcher in bird behaviour and tool use from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour.

"They're very explorative, very interested in everything, quite destructive, and I can totally see that they like the different textures, and the noise that it makes and just ripping things out," Dr Klump said.

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Bin raiding is a good example of how they use their brains and behavioural flexibility to access new resources, said Lucy Aplin from the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology, who's leading the Clever Cockie Project.

"It's a resource they're using to allow them to exist in these areas. And I think it's pretty amazing they've managed to do this," Dr Aplin said.

"It's annoying if it's your bins, but it's also an amazing example of behavioural adaptation."

And while bin cockies might be a relatively new phenomenon, it's clear that cockies have had a big impact on Australian cultural life for a very long time.

In 1988, the "sulphur-crested gang" caused some $50,000 worth of damage to the roof of the National Herbarium of New South Wales in Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens.

The cockies' rooftop antics caused rain to leak into the herbarium vault where millions of dollars' worth of botanical specimens were kept.

Have you caught cockatoos raiding your rubbish? Take the Clever Cockie bin-opening survey.

They also picked apart a new apartment building in the inner suburb of Rozelle in 2006, after the builders used rendered styrofoam for the building decorations. Apparently once they figured out how delicious the foam felt beneath their sharp beaks, the whole area was raining styrofoam bits like snow.

Similarly, in the Sydney CBD they hollowed out a styrofoam building facade so much they could clomp around inside it and take shelter from inclement weather.

Cockatoos will go as far as pushing heavy rocks off bin lids to access their contents. ( ABC: Ann Jones )

This sort of exploratory chewing habits put urban birds in the firing line, literally, with cockies being shot in the middle of Sydney after they chewed the facade of a UniLodge building in 2010.

Even national infrastructure projects are of no consequence to the cockatoos, which apparently chewed through $80,000 of broadband network cables in 2017.

Copycat cockie behaviour persists for generations

Their habits are so much more than a menace to the information superhighway or the local tidy town title.

The reason this German-based research team is here in suburban Australia is because this bin-opening could be the perfect new example of animal cultural transmission.

If only we could all go through life with the confidence of a sulfur-crested cockatoo. ( ABC: Ann Jones )

"Animal culture is behaviour which is shared by members of a population that is acquired through social learning — from copying another individual in the group — and the behaviour persists over generations," Dr Aplin said.

"The best example of animal culture that we have actually comes from work done in chimpanzees, which started with Jane Goodall, who found that tools and tool behaviour vary across chimpanzee populations in Africa.

"Young chimpanzees learn how to use tools from their mothers and this leads to local variance in this tool use behaviour.

"So it might just seem like a bit of a bit of a oddity, but actually we think it can be potentially really important because it allows populations to show locally adaptive behaviour that doesn't depend on their genes or on traditional Darwinian evolution."

These cockatoos often integrate the scientists studying them into their heirarchy. ( ABC: Ann Jones )

From bins to bubblers, cockies are adapting quickly

Think of how rapid the changes are in the environment for animals and plants in Australia today with pressures like land clearing, human population explosion, introduced pests and threats, altering food sources, climate changing and extreme weather events impacting every species.

The ability to innovate and then pass on that innovation to your friends and family might be incredibly important to the survival of your species.

Dr Barbara Klump observes the interactions of individual cockatoos in a flock at Stanwell park. ( ABC: Ann Jones )

The bin opening — that is, accessing a new resource in your local environment — could be significant, just like chimpanzees using tools. It's the cockies using the bins.

"Bin opening is just one example of the sorts of innovations that could spread in cockatoo society and help them adapt to urban environments," Dr Aplin said.

There's a nice example of this in Western Sydney.

"In a couple of sites we've seen them almost entirely abandon drinking from rivers and lakes to move to drinking from water bubblers," she said.

"They can twist the handle by landing on it and using their body weight, and then drink from the water bubbler."

Who's a clever bird?

Proving how behaviours like the bubbler drinking or bin opening spreads is part of the focus of Dr Klump's research.

Dr Klump said it became immediately obvious that not all cockies can open bins — it's a skill that a select few in the population actually have.

So how, and why, did those individuals learn it?

By putting painted markers on a flock of cockies, Dr Klump takes detailed observations of their interactions with each other.

"Every 10 minutes, I'm recording who is here, and with this data we can build social networks, so basically we can find out who the cockies hang out with, who their friends are, who their social circles are," she said.

Several cockatoos routinely spend hours challenging Dr Klump to play fight. ( ABC: Ann Jones )

Every afternoon Dr Klump stands in a park in Stanwell Park just south of Sydney with flocks of cockies at her feet, sort of like the pigeon lady from Mary Poppins, but with aggro cockies that try to open her backpack when she's not looking.

As she completes her observations, there are one, two or three cockies, constantly nipping her ankles and catching a ride playfully around on her boots.

"We see in these flocks [we're studying], that once they're used to a particular person, they fit you into the flock hierarchy," Dr Aplin said.

"Some of them will challenge you for dominance, while others will act subordinate to you.

"Some of them will try and allopreen your hair, which is a gesture of affiliative behaviour, sort of, 'You're my friend now'.

"I've never had that before, working with an animal where they actually fit you into their social network in that way."

The researchers mark the cockatoos with non-toxic paint in unique colour combinations so they can tell each individual bird apart. ( ABC: Ann Jones )

The researchers are piecing together incredible detail in the information about Sydney's cockies.

While cockies roost in large flocks of hundreds of birds, they often have some very close associates they hang around with, a bit like a clique, and often group in the daytime together in a big bunch called a "feeding party".

They also have very few birds with whom they'll preen and on top of that it appears that males have preening-bros — perhaps something like a gym-buddy relationship.

"We don't always get access to the inner lives or the social working of cockatoo society, and it's really fascinating to find out how complex those social lives are," Dr Aplin said.

"Parallel to us in the city there's also a cockatoo city where they're engaged in these complicated games of social politics and every individual is trying to find a mate, and find a nest site and successfully make their way up through cockatoo society.

"All at the same time, while we're going about our lives."