Parrots: Video calling could help lonely pet parrots
- Published
A new study has found that video calling could help lonely pet parrots. With the help from scientists, the birds were given a choice of friends to video call. The team found that after the video calls, the parrots started to show more social behaviours like singing and play. Parrots live in large flocks in the wild, but as pets they are usually kept alone or in a small group, so the team think the video calls could help the birds feel less lonely.
The birds were given a choice of which friend they'd like to call. The parrots who made the most calls also received more calls, suggesting the study helped the birds become more social. Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, from the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science, one of the authors of the study, said “There are 20 million parrots living in people’s homes in the USA, and we wanted to explore whether those birds might benefit from video calling too."
The team asked the caretakers of the birds to first teach them to associate touching a bell and touching the photo of another bird on the screen to start the video calls. This then started the meet and greet calls for the birds to start to get to know each other. According to researcher Rebecca Kleinberger from Northeastern University, the types of sounds the birds used suggested they were mirroring the call and response nature they engage in in the wild: “Hello, I’m here!” in parrot-speak.
The team monitored the birds carefully, starting with a maximum of five minutes for the video calls at first. The owners of the birds would stop any call if the bird's attention wandered. Scientists suggest the video calls could reproduce the social benefits of living in the wild in a flock.
After two weeks of getting to know each other, the birds could choose to call other parrots by ringing the bell then picking a bird to call. Parrots are intelligent, very social birds and the team hope that these video calls could help pet parrots feel less isolated.
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