In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• How a new white-throated sparrow song spread over 3,000 kilometers in just two decades, replacing a tune that had been stable since the 1950s

• The experiment that proved wild great tits can establish lasting cultural traditions through their social networks

• Why losing a population of birds might also mean losing knowledge that took generations to build

• 00:06 - The Excitement of Discovery

• 02:51 - Exploring Bird Culture and Social Learning

• 07:57 - Social Learning and Behavior Diffusion in Birds

• 18:53 - Training Cockatoos: Opening Wheelie Bins

• 26:50 - The Decline of Song in Regent Honeyeaters

• 32:54 - Cultural Innovations in Bird Conservation

Timestamp Disclosure
These timestamps were generated using AI and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided for accessibility and reference purposes only and may not perfectly reflect the original audio.

Dr. Lucy Aplin (Excerpt)

And he'd captured it on camera as he got onto the train. And he was like, oh, isn't that weird? And I went, oh, my God, this is so exciting. What have you just shown me?

Dr. Scott Taylor

There's this sound that lives in the back of my brain. And I don't mean a song like the Man I need by Olivia Dean, who I love. I mean a sound that is a place.

Imagine a black spruce in Tamarack bog in central Ontario at dawn in the spring when the mist is still sifting through the trees and the sphagnum is soaking through your boots. A white throated sparrow, dear sweet Canada, Canada, Canada. Three clear triplets ringing out across the woods. That was spring for me growing up.

That was home. So imagine my surprise when I found out that I might soon start hearing something different.

Around the year 2000, a collaborator of mine, Ken Otter, noticed that the local white throated sparrows around Prince George, British Columbia, weren't singing the classic three note ending anymore. They were singing something shorter, a two note stutter. Dear sweet canna, canna, canna.

He and his colleague Scott Ramsey started recording, and what they found was wild. That new ending had already taken over every sparrow population west of the Rockies, and it was spreading east fast.

By 2004, half the birds in Alberta had switched. By 2014, all of them had. And by 2019, it had traveled over 3,000 km and was showing up in Ontario and Quebec.

A song went viral in birds without the Internet. How? Migration. It turns out western sparrows winter in the southern Great Plains right alongside eastern birds.

Young males picked up the new tune on their wintering grounds and brought it home. One population taught another, and the old song, the one birders had known since the 1950s, started disappearing.

Now, song learning in passerines, the pershing birds that make up over 6,000 of the roughly 11,000 species on Earth, is one of the best studied forms of animal culture. Young birds learn their songs from older tutors during a sensitive developmental window. And once it's locked in, that's it.

Usually, what's wild about this sparrow story is that it shows us cultural change can sweep across an entire continent in real time. A behavior passed socially from bird to bird replaced a tradition that had been stable for decades.

And that raises a bigger question, because song isn't the only thing birds learn from each other. What about how they find food? Where they migrate? How they avoid predators, how they solve problems they've never even encountered before?

Which brings us to today's question. Okay, but do birds have culture that's what Dr. Lucy Aplin studies.

She's an associate professor at the Australian National University and the University of Zurich, and she runs a creative research program studying animal cognition and culture. In this episode, we're going to talk about what culture actually means when you strip away language and art galleries and TikTok.

We'll dig into how a bird that's never seen a garbage bin figures out how to pop the lid and. And whether that knowledge can outlast the individual who initially solved the puzzle.

And we'll ask whether losing a population of birds might also mean losing something we can't get back. A way of doing things that took generations to build. Stay with us. Well, welcome back, everyone. I'm excited to have Lucy with us today on the podcast.

And thanks for joining us.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to it.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah. Culture. We're talking about bird culture today, and I think when most people hear that term bird culture, they think we're metaphorical.

So what's like the simplest way to explain what culture actually means kind of in a biological sense, and why we can study that in birds?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Yeah. So we run into this. The whole field has had this problem of how do we define culture in a way that is actually possible to test in animals?

Because if we think of culture in terms of our belief system or the way we feel about how we fit into groups, then we can't ask animals and if they fit into groups and what they believe. Right. So we have to stick to a really functional, testable definition.

And what the field sort of coalesced on is this idea that culture is a socially learned behavior or skill or knowledge. So it's something that's transmitted from one individual to another through copying, usually.

But it could also be interaction with what the other ones left behind. And it's held in populations or groups, so it spreads between individuals to reach sort of that group level trait. And it persists over time.

And we know actually now that some animal cultures have persisted over thousands of years, so they really have stuck around in groups.

And we think if we can satisfy all of those three, then we have something which looks like a cultural trait which is not that dissimilar to some of the behaviors we see in humans as well.

Dr. Scott Taylor

One of the stories that I guess I think of when I. When I hear about culture in birds is this the milk bottle story with great tits and blue tits.

And I was wondering if you could walk us through a little bit about the history of that story and what it kind of helped US understand about birds.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

I love that the earliest documented example of an animal culture was not in primates or whales like you might think, but in birds. So in 1921 there was this study where it was in the south of England and it was an early example of citizen science.

People started reporting that great tits and blue tits, two little garden birds which are both like chickadees, they're related to chickadees, were piercing the tops of the foil caps of milk bottles that were delivered to people's doorsteps and eating the cream.

Fisher and Hind did this fantastic study with hand drawn graphs in it that showed that from all the reports they'd been receiving over the next 10 year period, spread geographically over actually most of the UK and also in part of Ireland too. Now these birds, they have a generation time of only about two years.

So the fact that they documented it over at least 10 years suggested also that it had stuck around. This was pretty much, I think, this story stuck in pop culture.

It caught the imagination of a lot of people, but it wasn't really picked up by the scientific field until the 90s when Louis Lefebvre, who is a professor in animal behavior and done some amazing work on documenting animal innovations, went back to these original studies and said, well, we now know we have examples of primate culture in macaques, in chimpanzees, in orangutans. All of these major studies coming out in the 90s and early 2000s demonstrating they have culture.

Is this old study in tits an example of potential case of the spread of innovation to form a new cultural trait. So he reanalyzed that data and said, yeah, it was really highly suggestive that it was, but of course we didn't have anything more than that.

We don't have the original data set from 1921. He was working off those hand drawn graphs and so it was really open to go out and ask these questions again. But yes, it's folk tale.

Well, it's a little bit more than that because it was a proper study. But this general idea in the public that birds could actually learn from each other and adopt new behaviours, it does.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Really capture the imagination. I guess it's something about the milk being delivered and the little birds stealing.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

I think it's the suburban nature of the whole thing. Right. It's like a little urban legend and a suburban tale.

Dr. Scott Taylor

I love that. Yeah.

I guess the next question that comes up is how do learned behaviors move through populations and across generations and what makes some behaviors stick while others just die out?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

So if we think of a behavior, we have a few sources of variation, right? Probably all of them will influence the behavior that we see in the end. So of course it could be genetically inherited.

It could also be individually learned through trial and error experience on the part of the animal, or it could be acquired through observing another animal. So that would be the social learning part of it.

So if we want to isolate behavior and identify that it's socially learned, we need to really exclude those other two sources of variation. And there's a few ways we can do that. So we can look for cultural inheritance by using cross fostering experiments.

And there's been some, some fantastic work, especially done by Professor Slagsvold in Norway, where he has moved eggs between nests, between different nests of the same species, or actually between blue tit and great tit nests, going back to those model species before.

And then he's been able to quantify how much of the behavior that he observes in the adult bird is similar to its foster parents versus its actual genetic parents.

This has been a really classic method in which we can use to identify behavior that's been learned from the social context as opposed to through other means. Another way we can do it is through what we call cultural diffusion experiments.

This is where we introduce a new behavior into a population, usually by training an individual or sometimes relying on natural innovations, and then watch that behavior spread and track its spread. And if it spreads through the social network through social contacts, then it's most likely to have been adopted through those social contacts. Right?

Because if it was innovated individually, we would expect that you'd see it popping up all over the place, because every animal hypothetically has equal opportunity to engage in the behavior. And obviously in that case, we can also rule out that it's genetically inherited, because it's something completely new that we're.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Introducing in the context of introducing a new behavior or new task, like training an individual and then watching how it moves through a population. How do you actually track those interactions contemporarily?

I can imagine historically we would have had to just watch and band birds and see who is interacting with whom.

But it's much more technologically advanced now to be able to track and see, okay, how does the social network track this new behavior as it diffuses through a population? Can you tell us a little bit about how we do that?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Most what I would call cultural diffusion experiments in the past happened in captivity, because this is the easiest context to do it in. You catch a bunch of birds or even you just do it in a dyadic way.

So you put two birds in a cage and one of them knows the behavior and you see if the other one adopts it. You can then expand that to a group context to make it a little bit more ecologically relevant.

But, but really we want to be able to do this in the wild to fully understand it in the context of ecology. The way I've done this in my model species. The great tier has been to use pick tag operated devices and also antenna.

So these are RFID tags we can either inject into the bird or put on little leg rings. We put them on little leg rings so they're a little bit like plastic color bands that some of your other guests might have talked about.

But instead of being identifiable by eye, they're identifiable on a data logger that can detect that, just like your swipe card to get into your office store. It's exactly the same technology. And then we can put these antenna on anything we want.

So we tend to put them around bird feeders, at least in great tits. And then with a grid of these bird feeders, we can detect where everybody's going to feed and build up a picture of who they feed with.

And kind of this doesn't mean much on the space of a day or a couple of individuals, but over tens and thousands of observations to two individuals foraging together, you can build a social network.

And we can use exactly the same technology to detect when individuals solve our puzzles and how they solve our puzzles, which allows us to automate the whole system and kind of track these two things going on in the same time. Social network and the behavior or individual's learning of this behavior, all in a.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Natural context, like all out in the field, which is such an advance from like you were talking about, these captive studies of didactic comparisons. This is just all happening out in the woods, which is incredible. Can you tell us about some of the problems that you trained the great tits to solve?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Yeah, so we've trained them mostly on a sliding door task. It was a, it was a funny process. When we did these studies, we started off coming up with all sorts of different problems for them to solve.

Pulling levers were turning dials. And in the end I actually went back to this old and classic task that they've used in chimpanzees, which is just a sliding door.

Here the idea is they adjust. Actually I have a few of the tasks up here behind me.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Oh yeah, nice.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

So you have a two action door and the door can move in either direction. And the idea is that you train the bird to move the door left to get to the bird feeder behind it and then release it into a subpopulation.

And you hope that if it's social learning, all the local birds will be pushing left to get into this. Into this feeder. And you do the same thing, the balance design, obviously, in another population where they all.

You release a demonstrator trained on pushing right.

And because it's what we call a two action and control design, it means that you've got this lovely balanced experiment where you should be able to disentangle social learning from asocial learning, because there's two equally difficulties, equally rewarding alternatives to get to the one solution. And the only possible difference between the populations is the knowledgeable individual who starts off the spread of behavior.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah, yeah. I love the balanced nature of it. And you just trained one individual and then released that single individual.

Did you train a handful of individuals or did you play around with that across the experimental timeframe?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

So in this experiment, I guess we're talking about in the first one, where I did it in the wild, I was part of a team at the University of Oxford in Professor Ben Sheldon's lab, who were all out in this large woodland area measuring and studying different aspects of the social network. So that meant I had a fantastic platform where I knew the different social communities across this wide woodland.

It's a population of about 1500 birds. So I found isolated social communities in different or relatively isolated social communities in different parts of the woods.

And I trained two demonstrators in each of them. So left or right, or I caught a bird and I train and that was the control population. So I did that in a patchwork across the woodlands.

And before you asked me why I did two instead of one, it was just my own gutlessness that I was afraid I was going to spend 10 days training this bird and release it and watch it being, you know, eaten by a sparrowhawk. As it left my hand, I would.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Have the same concern. I might have even gone to three or four. I've seen how ravenous like around here.

Coopers and Sharptions hawks can be around our chickadee feeders, which is.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Yeah, but in the end I had. But all of them didn't, so I needn't have worried. But I guess the belt and braces approach.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah. So how do you train them? What's the process for training them to do this task before you release them back into the population?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Any dog owner will know you can train anything into an animal with not shaping so it's exactly the same thing. We just slowly, slowly shape the behaviors we want. And it usually takes about a week. And then the birds are solving the task.

The hardest part for them with this problem and for many problems is the object permanence. So it's that point where the food is finally completely hidden and the bird has to remember. It's surprising how many birds go, oh, oops.

I guess the food's disappeared. Then that's the end.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

You have to be like, no, it's still there.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

So it's a cognitive problem, not a physical problem, but that's how we do it. And we've got pretty expert at it now. We've also trained birds, cockatoos, for example, in the wild itself. And it works, it works really well.

The particularly frustrating but also exciting part is when you've taken a week of sort of mind numbing days in the lab to convince this bird that opening the door provides a food rewarder. And then you release it into the wild and you watch the second bird. Watch that bird and learn it in two minutes.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

And I remember I went to the first one and I saw, you know, 50, right? Or something. I was like, oh, yes. And then I went to the second one and I saw, you know, 100, right.

And I was like, oh my God, I think it might be working.

And then one of the research assistants who was walking around another part of the wood helping me fill these things up with mealworms, texted me and went, I think it might be working. Lucy.

Dr. Scott Taylor

That's amazing. That's so exciting.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Yes. So exciting.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

That's why we do science, right?

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah, exactly. After all that work, to see like a thing working in the field is incredible.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

And to see that they were all sticking to the same side, which my 10 years of research since then has shown that they really will like.

What's astounding is how many birds utilize social learning to acquire new behavior and how faithfully they will copy the other individuals, not the opposite.

Which is where we sort of started 10, 15 years ago with this idea that, oh, probably the culture will erode rapidly and they'll all just figure it out and then it will be just 50, 50, whatever they'll do. That's not what we see at all in almost every species that's been tested.

Now instead we just see this rapid social learning and this sort of really faithful adoption of what they see others doing.

Dr. Scott Taylor

It would be great to hear more about your cockatoo work as well, since it's a different kind of problem that they're solving. Tell us, how do they open these bins?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Yes. So in Australia, we have what we call wheelie bins. It's very Australian. A bit of Australian slang for you.

Dr. Scott Taylor

We have wheelie bins too, but we don't call them that. But I love that.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

What do you call them?

Dr. Scott Taylor

I don't know, garbage bins. But they have wheels and a top that opens.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Well, we can't say anything full in Australia, so wheelie bins, as far as we're gonna go, I love it if we reduce every word. Yeah. So in all the suburbs of every Australian town and city, once a week, people wheel their wheelie bins to the curb.

And these are sort of your standard half or full sized plastic bins with a flipping top to them.

And the tricky part for the cockatoos and for the people is they're quite heavy and quite large, and they have to be automatically emptied by a bin truck. So someone's not dragging them to the curb. There's a bin coming with a robot arm that empties them.

So what the birds do to open these bins that magically appear on the curb once a week full of pasta and pizza and all good things, is they have to learn to stand on the rim of the bin.

So it seems actually to be the first cognitive challenge for them is a lot of them try to stand on the top of the bin, on the lid itself, and pull against their own body weight. And of course this doesn't work.

So they have to learn to get off the lid, stand on the rim of the bin, and then there's a handle on the edge which they can push up.

They usually do this with their foot, and then they have to transfer it to their bill and shuffle down the side of the bin so that they can gradually work the lid up because it's very heavy for them.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

And then the other hardest part is they get to that point where they have to do a big push and manage to flip it over the edge. And if they do that, then they can pull food out of the bin.

So it's about five distinct steps that my postdoc at the time, Barbara Klump, who's now an assistant professor at the University of Vienna, she did a really amazing study where she described all of these steps in really high detail.

And she found that, like I said, many birds are actually in the process of learning, so they would be able to get to step three, but they haven't quite worked out how they do the flip. Or maybe they haven't worked out even that they shouldn't stand on top yet and they're just pulling, reefing on the.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Top but keeping it shut.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Exactly. And it seems to take birds months, even now we know years to fully acquire this behavior.

So it's quite different from that example in the great tits of five minutes and it's done.

It's something which is really physically and cognitively difficult for these birds but obviously gives high rewards and is still possible to learn from observing other individuals.

I did a visiting research fellowship at the Australian Museum in, in Sydney where I was helping some local collaborators who were doing urban ecology of the sulphur crested cockatoos. They're really successful urban adapter in Australia and I just thought they were fascinating.

So I was working on their social networks and my collaborator came into work one day at the museum on this three month visit I had, he said look what I just saw. And he showed me on his phone. He had just caught the train in from the south of Sydney where he lived.

And at the train station that morning there was a cockatoo opening a bin and he had captured it on camera as he got onto the train and he was like, oh, isn't that weird? And I went, oh my God, this is so exciting. What have you just shown me? Is this a start of a new milk bottle?

But the milk bottle is not a milk bottle, it's a full on rubbish bin and the birds are on the grapes. It's an actual cockatoo. And can we track it? Has anyone else seen this?

Because I've never heard of this happening and I think he really had captured one of the first incidences. It was in the area we later identified as pretty much the first place that it was starting to take off.

And we were also able to show with this intensive study that there was a signature in the local social network. So birds that were more socially connected to each other were more likely to open bins.

And birds that were in the process of learning how to open bins were more connected to fully knowledgeable individuals. So in this case we couldn't track it through the network, but we could look for that.

So signature of past learning on the social network, which is what we did.

The same mechanisms that allowed for this rapid spread of innovation to establish as a new culture, then allow for that culture to adapt and change to the new challenges or are they stuck in this tradition like in the way we think of tradition sometimes in humans that they're quite slow to keep up with new challenges. So the Answer in a nutshell for the cockatoos is no. They can rapidly keep up to new challenges. And the new challenges were provided by the people.

So we had this lovely natural experiment where the bins were our new puzzle box, but they were provided by these residents of Sydney on every street corner once a week.

And then once the behavior had spread and is continuing to spread, we had people coming along behind and changing the resource to effectively make it more complex. Just as the cockatoos were socially learning how to get into bins, people were socially learning how to prevent cockatoos getting into bins.

We started adding to our citizen science surveys to ask people to report what are cockatoos defeating? When did they start defeating it? How do you protect your bin? And have you changed the protection you've used on your bins?

And again, this was Barbara Klumpf who led this work, the postdoc in my lab. And she managed to show that the two were tracking each other really quite closely.

So people escalated over time to more and more, let's say complex anti cockatoo measures. So they'd start with the rock on the bin, but pretty much everywhere, cockatoos know how to open bins.

They also can push the rock rocks off the bins and then they would escalate all the way to either these belt and braces approach.

We have these hilarious photos of people who put three different protection types on the same bin to think, well, one of these is going to stop it or a full commercial bin lock. And people told us that the reason they were doing this was because the cockatoos had defeated the other protection measures they had used.

They're mostly relying on horizontal learning, what we call kind of learning within from your peers. And they do this throughout their whole life.

They're not just concentrating on the early stage and that actually a big difference between foraging and song cultures where they are really learning in that early developmental period. And this means that the flexibility of the population is really enhanced because bins can pop up. You're a 50 year old cockatoo. Yes.

It's more complex than a tick because you can spend a year learning it while a tick can't afford to do that.

And you've got a larger brain as well, but you can still learn it and you can still transmit it onwards to other individuals and you don't have to sort of need, you don't need that vertical transmission across parent to offspring.

Dr. Scott Taylor

There's a cool recent story about Regent honeyeaters, critically endangered Australian species. And they're trying to captive raise individuals and then release them to help the population.

But they ran into this issue where their captive males had nobody to learn from.

But this is in the song context, so that, and I would assume, I guess, that they have a constrained period for song learning and then they had to get these tutors. But it is interesting to think about because song can be culturally transmitted. What's the deal with species losing culture?

And I don't know if you want to use the Regent honeyeater as an example.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Yeah, I absolutely will because I love them and I think it's tragic. There's only less than 250 in the wild now, we think really beautiful, beautiful song as well, that they've lost almost entirely.

So this is a small Australian honeyeater, which is a little bit like our version of a hummingbird, but it's a passerine, they eat nectar. And they went through massive population declines.

They're not really sure why, but when they started to do intensive study on them for conservation regions, they noticed that the song was also being lost from these populations.

So it was really over the space of 10 years or a little bit longer, but it was about 10 years they were studying them that they went from this really complex, beautiful passerine, burbling, complex song, like sort of a bit like a blackbird, to what they called the clipped song, which was just really a couple of notes and nothing like it. And not only that, they also started to see them incorporating other species into their song as well, which they don't usually do.

They're not a mimic.

So the idea was that what must be happening is that the young males are living under such low population densities that they have no adult males to listen to.

And it's understood from other song studies, as well as the later captive work they did that often young male birds that learn their song, they need multiple role models to learn from. They can't just learn from their father. They need to be listening at different periods of, of their development to the males around them.

And then that sort of crystallizes into a song as adults and females have a preference for the song of their own species that is innate.

And so you've got these female region honeyeaters out there trying to hear the song and not hearing it because the males have lost it, which then of course leads to reproductive crashes in the population. So the system starts to collapse. And the other side of this story is that they started captive breeding programs.

But when they started them, they weren't thinking about culture, so they were instead trying to breed them as fast as possible, remove them from their parents, create them as young individuals together. And they developed what they call the captive song, which is this weird babbling juvenile song that even the adults sing.

This is work by Dr. Ross Crates especially.

And it's been really amazing how much he's been able to turn this around by convincing these really well meaning, but potentially with different priority zoo conservationists that they need to include culture. And they need to take the time and effort to train wild song into these young birds, which requires having the wild type singing males.

And they're very rare now, bringing them in, providing multiple tutors because they can't learn from just a single male, they can't learn from a tape recording. They need the actual live male singing.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Wow.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

And then generating these birds which could then be released with the wild type song.

And they've just done their first releases of birds with the complex song now and they're hoping that these birds will be able to find mates in the wild because the problem they had with previous releases of these babbling songbirds was that nobody was interested because the females don't want that, do they?

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing to think about how much more complex conservation efforts like that need to be.

You know, in the case where culture is so, so important for the way these birds interact with one another. Like it's not enough to. Yeah. Just put more out in nature that don't know how to sing properly.

So in your professional or personal opinion, what bird species is the ultimate trendsetter?

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Okay. The ultimate trendsetter. We have some really cool examples of birds where their cultures change rapidly.

And so I think those might be some sort of trend inserting birds.

So great tits might be one example, but someone might throw in some unusual ones here, like the pink footed geese and brent geese, a few different geese species which have really flexible migration routes and they're able to expand their migration into new areas through social transmission and open up new breeding grounds in these high Arctic areas that are now becoming available.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Amazing. Yeah. And the fact that that's like a socially shared thing is incredible. Definitely.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

And can cross between species as well. So you can have species following other species and then discovering new areas and then that information can spread within their own species.

There's some really cool studies and it's a great example of how culture maybe is something we should need to consider for threatened species, but it's also a mechanism by which some species are taking advantage of the new possibilities in this changing world and managing to do very well, thank you very much.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Yeah. No, that's amazing.

All right, we've reached the part of the show we call that's BS or that's bird stuff, where we give our guests an opportunity to debunk a myth that ruffles their feathers. So, Lucy, what do you want to.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Call BS on this idea that urban birds are necessarily urban colonizing birds that have moved into the city? And the reason this ruffles my feathers is because it's something that applies to the cockatoos that we study as well as some of the other species.

It's this idea that the city's always been there and the birds have moved into it. The city hasn't always been there. In the case of the cockatoos and many other species, they were there first, and the city grew up around them.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Right. I don't think a lot of us think about the fact that many organisms live long enough to watch the same progress, you know, and especially birds.

I think that's an amazing point and an important one for people to think about. So, yeah, thanks so much for joining us today. This has been really, really fascinating. I love the.

I don't know, the careful research you described and just these really interesting innovations, and I think, yeah, it's amazing to think about culture and how it spreads and persists in these birds we all love. So thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Dr. Lucy Aplin

Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. I always. I'm happy to talk about this for as long as you would let me.

I just think it's fascinating to think about the whole world that's going on inside the minds of the birds around us.

Dr. Scott Taylor

Birds are dinosaurs, and around here, we like our snacks. So we end each episode with a dinosaur nugget. Today's nugget is when a cockatoo in Sydney figured out how to flip open a wheelie bin to steal food.

It wasn't instinct. It was innovation. And when other cockatoos across the city started doing it, too.

Learning by observing one another and passing on the behavior, not just all independently innovating. That's not just learning. That's culture. Birds are dinosaurs. And it's now very clear that dinosaurs have culture, too.

That's a wrap on this week's episode. Okay, but do birds have culture? Do you follow us on social media? If not, you're missing a lot of bonus Okay, But... questions and answers. So find us @okaybutbirds everywhere. We'll catch you next time. Byeee. Okay, But... Birds is hosted by Scott Taylor with production and creative by Zach Karl.

Transcript Disclosure
This transcript was generated using AI-assisted transcription and may contain errors or omissions. Please refer to the audio or video episode for the most accurate representation.

All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• White-throated Sparrow audio contributed by Bob McGuire, ML219799

• White-throated Sparrow audio contributed by Jocelyn Lauzon, ML121581051

• Great Tit audio contributed by Arnoud B. van den Berg, ML36198

• Eurasian Sparrowhawk audio contributed by Ben F. King, ML335224

• Regent Honeyeater audio contributed by Vicki Powys, ML223277

• Pink-footed Goose audio contributed by Bob McGuire, ML235508