Cockatoos in Australia Begin to Drink from Local Water Fountains

"These Australian Cockatoos Learned to Operate Drinking Fountains With Their Feet to Quench Their Thirst"

By: Sara Hashemi, Smithsonian Magazine

June 8th, 2025 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-australian-cockatoos-learned-to-operate-drinking-fountains-with-their-feet-to-quench-their-thirst-180986742/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

 https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/TvEIiA7lu8LWmgOCiTkSoNwHdz0=/1026x684/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/41/4a/414a477b-3310-4ee0-8c23-e0abb6f3c564/screenshot_2025-06-04_at_124436pm.png

 

Cockatoos in Australia have recently learned how to drink from water fountains to stay hydrated by using their feet to push down the button. These suburban-dwelling birds are reported to be excellent at learning how to perform new skills, having already learned how to open garbage cans to extract food scraps, and are intelligent creatures. Barbara Klump who attends the University of Vienna as a behavioral ecologist was shocked to initially learn of this happening, so began monitoring them with her research team. They found that this drinking was a regular occurrence and “(over) 44 days, the team recorded nearly 14 hours of the cockatoos around the fountain. The birds made 525 drinking attempts, of which 41 percent were successful” (Sara Hashemi, Smithsonian Magazine), proving that this behavior is intentional and often. The hypothesis behind the Cockatoos behavior includes that they “have gotten a taste for the purer water coming from the fountains”, they “prefer the height of the fountain” as to escape predators, or that “(spending) time at the fountains could be a form of social cohesion” (Sara Hashemi, Smithsonian Magazine).

 

This headline jumped out at me, as I knew birds were smart, but it is not every day that you heard of them successfully completing human tasks. These water fountains look more complicated than those here in Vancouver, which makes this feat even more impressive. The more tasks they can complete, the closer to accurate human behavior they resemble, which is a slightly startling thing. Also, the fact that they figured out how to turn on the fountain by themselves makes this discovery much more astounding. It is one thing if a human were to assist them in teaching them how the system works, but to completely figure out the workings of it themselves is extremely surprising. This shows that the Cockatoos must have observed human actions of turning the fountain on, to then go and imitate their behavior and sip their desired form of water.