Polly want… an iPad?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Pet parrots are smart and social, but often live alone. Their isolation can lead to stress, poor well-being, even self-harm. BUT, co-housing parrots can spread disease. Ew.
Is… the answer… Zoom?!?
Rebecca Kleinberger and team at MIT tried just that. They taught eighteen parrots to video call other birds. Over three months, the parrots made nearly ONE-HUNDRED-FIFTY calls. Several even became regular buddies.
Some cuddled up to the screen, showed off toys, sang duets, or imitated each other.
Offering social choice could improve parrot wellbeing. With over twenty million parrots in US homes, this might be the TWEET-ment they need!
It’s true… Birds of a feather FaceTime together!
Reference: Kleinberger, R., Cunha, J., Vemuri, M. M., & Hirskyj-Douglas, I. (2023). Birds of a feather video-flock together: Design and evaluation of an agency-based parrot-to-parrot video-calling system for interspecies ethical enrichment. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–16). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581166