alt Hacker NewsCockies are the pranksters of the bird world. They're smart and they think it's hilarious to mess with each other and anyone else. They also tear everything to pieces. So it's no surprise really that if any bird worked out how to operate a drinking fountain it'd be these hilarious little jerks.
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If they are the pranksters, I wonder what that makes the Kea. I think they are counted as smarter, they definitely enjoy a bit of malicious fun.
> hilarious little jerks.
We had a galah chewing our hosepipe the other day. I pointed and said "oi!" and the little scamp stopped, straightened up, looked me right in the eye and ... did it again.
Oh and not to forget the kookas. I heard a pop and noise like water a few weeks ago, and ran into our living room. Outside the main window there's that hose reel mounted on the wall that was spraying freely against the glass. A kookaburra had somehow pulled the hozelock end off and was taking a shower.
Indeed. My father spent a lot of time bellowing at cockatoos that’d land in his fruit trees and tear them to pieces. He’d storm about and wave a broom at them until they took off. Classic old man yelling at clouds.
When he was on the other side of the house in the garage, they’d take fruit from the trees and drop them on the sloping driveway so they rolled down into the garage. Come play old fella.
Caiques and Blue Hyacinths are definitely more pranksters, Cockatoos are just plain psychos.
When I lived in Australia we had a wooden full length porch (elevated), and where we lived in the hills outside Melbourne we could easily have 20-30 cockatoos hang out on it in the morning. They were mercifully not loud, but they absolutely destroyed the deck rails, and we had to replace them with heavier duty industrial plastic deck.
I was visiting a place that takes in rescue animals, in this case they had a lot of birds.
In their typical speech to people about NOT keeping birds as pets they described some of the birds as "highly curious, the maturity of a human 5 year old, with an intense desire to be destructive".