Report Parrots find ‘laughter’ contagious and high-five in mid air

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If your parrot is feeling glum, it might be tweetable. Wild keas spontaneously burst into playful behaviour when exposed to the parrot equivalent of canned laughter – the first birds known to respond to laughter-like sounds.

The parrots soared after one another in aerobatic loops, exchanged foot-kicking high fives in mid-air and tossed objects to each other, in what seems to be emotionally contagious behaviour. And when the recording stops, so does the party, and the birds go back to whatever they had been doing.

We already knew that these half-metre-tall parrots engage in playful behaviour, especially when young. What’s new is that a special warbling call they make has been shown to trigger behaviour that seems to be an equivalent of spontaneous, contagious laughter in humans.

Moreover, it’s not just the young ones that respond, adults of both sexes join in the fun too.

Raoul Schwing of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, and his team played 5-minute recordings to gatherings of between two and a dozen wild keas on a mountainside of New Zealand’s Arthur’s Pass National Park, on the southern island.

The group played recordings of the warble sound, or other sounds, including two other frequent kea sounds – a screech and a whistle – plus the alarm call of a local robin species and a bland tone.


Read more here. (New Scientist)
 
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