Happy Nice Mall

Many animals are known to use tools, but a bird named Bruce is perhaps one of the most ingenious non-human tool inventors: a disabled parrot who designed and used his own prosthetic beak.

Bruce is the Kea, a parrot species found only in New Zealand. He’s about 9 years old, and when wildlife researchers found him as a baby, he was missing his upper beak, probably because he had been caught in a trap made for mice and other invasive mammals the country was trying to eradicate. This is a serious injury, as the Keas use their strikingly long and curved upper beak to trim their feathers to get rid of parasites and remove dirt and grime.

But Bruce found a solution: He learned to pick up pebbles of the right size for himself, hold them between his tongue and his lower beak, and comb his feathers with the tip of the stone. Other animals use tools, but Bruce’s invention of his own prosthetic is unique.

The researchers published their findings Friday in the journal Scientific Reports. Studies of animal behavior are misleading – researchers need to make careful, objective observations and always be wary of biases resulting from anthropomorphization or erroneous attribution of human traits to animals.

“The main criticism we received before the release was, ‘Well, this activity with pebbles may have just happened by chance – you accidentally saw it with a pebble in its mouth,” said animal cognition researcher Amalia PM Bastos. University of Auckland and lead author of the study. “But no. This has been repeated many times. He drops the pebble, he goes and gets it. He wants the pebble. If he doesn’t clean it, he doesn’t pick up a pebble for something else.”

Dorothy M. Fragaszy, a retired professor of psychology at the University of Georgia who has published widely on animal behavior but was unaware of Bruce’s exploits, praised the work as a model of how to study tool use in animals.

“The careful analyzes of behavior in this report allow for strong conclusions that the behavior is flexible, deliberate, and an independent discovery by this individual,” he said.

The researchers set themselves careful rules.

First, they determined that Bruce wasn’t randomly playing with pebbles: When he picked up a pebble, he used it to straighten it nine times out of 10. When he dropped a pebble, he either retrieved it or picked up another 95 percent of the time. one and then continued cleaning. Instead of randomly sampling the pebbles, it consistently took pebbles of the same size.

None of the other Keas in its vicinity used pebbles to chip it, and when other birds manipulated the stones, they collected randomly sized pebbles. Bruce’s intentions were clear.

“Bruce hasn’t seen anyone do this,” Ms. Bastos said. “It came on its own, which is pretty cool. We were lucky enough to observe this. We can learn a lot if we pay a little more attention to what animals do, both in the wild and in captivity.”

Keas is generally quite intelligent, but Mrs. Bastos said Bruce is clearly more intelligent than other birds, being very easily trained in highly complex tasks as well as developing his own ideas. Ms. Bastos said she was sometimes asked why she didn’t give Bruce a prosthetic beak.

He always replies, “He doesn’t need it.” “He’s on good terms with himself.”