Wild Cockatoos Are Just as Smart as Lab-Raised Ones - The New York Times

And they compared the performance of laboratory-raised cockatoos and wild-caught birds, to see if the lab-raised birds had acquired an edge by hanging out with human beings.

As the researchers reported Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, the wild birds were just as smart as the captive birds — but a good deal less interested in bothering with the experiment at all.

And perhaps birds that have spent a lot of time around humans and their experiments get the idea that a weird-looking apparatus indicates that humans are going to offer food for otherwise nonsensical tasks like moving a lever or pushing a button.

Each time the birds were set in the arena, the tasks were shuffled, hidden behind different doors.

The researchers set up a kind of competition between the major-league, lab-raised team in Vienna and a pickup squad of temporarily captive cockatoos.

Sometimes the birds, both lab-raised and wild, had their own idea of how a problem might be solved.

The researchers classified 10 of 11 lab birds as motivated, meaning they began right away to open doors and look for food.

Only three of the eight wild birds were motivated

But the motivated birds — both wild-caught and lab-raised — performed at the same level in solving the tasks

Rössler said that if the wild birds “decide they want to interact with the apparatus, they are just as skillful problem solvers.”