Female cockatoos don’t seem to want to dance along to the drumming of a male Christina Zdenek

Move over Ringo Starr. Male palm cockatoos have got rhythm too – and they also use their drumming skills to impress the ladies.

The males have been filmed making drumsticks in the rainforests of northern Australia, and then drumming to a regular beat. The rhythmic drumming was first described in 1984, but this is the first detailed study of it.

Palm cockatoos are the only species other than us known to make a musical tool or instrument, perform with that instrument and repeat musical patterns throughout the performance, says Robert Heinsohn at the Australian National University in Canberra.


Over a seven-year period, Heinsohn and his colleagues have filmed and analysed more than 60 cockatoo drumming events in Queensland’s Kutini-Payamu National Park.

It typically took 100 hours of trying to capture a single drumming event, says team member Christina Zdenek of the University of Queensland. “Now that was hard work,” she says.

Individual styles

The drumming is part of a complex display that males put on for any watching females. Sometimes the males drum with a large seed pod. On other occasions, they snap off a small branch, trim it down to about 20 centimetres and bring it to the nests they make in tree hollows.

They hold the drumstick in their left foot and bang it on the tree while making complex calls, flapping their wings and erecting their feathery crest.

Each of the 18 birds that the team observed had its own unique drumming style. Some had a slow and steady beat, others played faster and with more variability.

The females watch performing males closely to assess their skills, Heinsohn says. But unlike human groupies, they don’t respond to the beat in any observable way.

Many animals, such as birds and frogs, call or sing in highly regular ways – but they don’t use tools to do it.

Males snap off and trim down sticks to turn them into drumsticks Christina Zdenek

And those animals that do use tools do so to get food. For instance, chimpanzees fashion spears for hunting bushbabies or use twigs for catching termites.

“Palm cockatoos are unique in their ability to make a tool to amplify sound and then in using it to generate a percussive rhythm,” Heinsohn says.

Male palm cockatoos use sticks to build their nests in tree hollows, he says, so it would have been a small step to start tapping with one at the hollow entrance.

The animal band

Wild chimps, bonobos and gorillas sometimes drum on tree buttresses with their hands or feet, but they don’t keep a steady beat. However, in 2005, a captive chimp called Barney spontaneously played an impressive five-minute drum solo on a bucket.

And while female cockatoos don’t gyrate to the beat of drumming males, studies of captive animals, including sea lions and capuchin monkeys, show that some species do have the ability to respond to a rhythm. A chimp called Ai has learned to tap on a keyboard in time to a rhythm, for instance.

Then, of course, there’s Snowball, a domesticated cockatoo that dances to music. Studies have confirmed that he keeps time with the beat, slowing down or speeding up if the music does the same.

Heinsohn hopes to find out more about the drumming behaviour by, for instance, playing back recordings to see how they respond to rhythmic versus non-rhythmic beats.

Another interesting question is whether there are cultural differences, says Tecumseh Fitch at the University of Vienna, Austria, who studies the evolution of speech and music. Do palm cockatoos in New Guinea drum differently to those in Australia?

Answering these questions might take a while. “They are extraordinarily hard to work with,” Heinsohn says.

Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1602399

Read more: Born to dance: The animals with natural rhythm