Wild Cockatoos Learn Which Snacks Are Safe to Eat by Copying Their Friends, New Research Suggests

Munching on the wrong items can lead to illness, but social learning might help the birds avoid making a potentially deadly mistake. The phenomenon could help explain why certain cockatoos have fared so well in urban environments

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

May 8, 2026 11:44 a.m.

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Copycats are everywhere in nature. Animals like dolphins, chimpanzees and meerkats are all known to learn to forage or use tools by observing their friends, a phenomenon called social learning. It turns out that wild cockatoos in Australia also figure out which potential snacks are safe to eat by copying their peers, researchers report April 30 in the journal PLOS Biology.

Birds living in urban environments constantly come across new foods. “The big issue with urban birds is, they kind of eat everything,” says study co-author Julia Penndorf, a behavioral ecologist now at the University of Exeter in England, to Kate Golembiewski at the New York Times.

That comes with risks: Feasting on the wrong items could make the animals sick, give them parasites or lead to other bad outcomes.  

Penndorf and her colleagues wondered whether wild sulfur-crested cockatoos—a type of parrot all over Sydney, Australia—use social learning to determine whether a shiny new snack is worth the risk. They’re already known to be quite clever. Previously, some of the study authors found that the animals had learned to open trash can lids by observing their friends.

In the new research, scientists studied eating behavior in 705 birds across five roosting communities in Sydney. First, they gave each animal unique markings with nontoxic paint so that they could keep track of them.

“They’re the most cheeky birds I know,” Penndorf tells the Times, explaining that curious cockatoos surrounded her when she was trying to mark them. “All the paint bottles became a playground for cockatoos trying to balance on them, flying away with them. One managed to make a call on my phone because I left it unlocked on the ground.”

Then, at each of two roosting sites, the team trained a pair of cockatoos to eat unshelled almonds dyed either red or blue, making them novel. Once those four birds started to munch regularly on the bright nuts, the researchers introduced almonds of both colors to their communities.

The trained birds’ color preferences caught on quickly, with naïve animals following suit on the first of ten experiment days. They initially ate only the colored almonds preferred by the demonstrators, but they started to eat the other dyed nuts, too.

At a site without trained birds, however, animals didn’t start chowing down on colored almonds until day four, but the behavior spread after that. What’s more, the researchers offered bright nuts to birds at two more sites without trained individuals for an additional ten days. Animals there began to eat the novel foods as well, the team found, probably because they learned to do so from birds from other sites that were familiar with the dyed almonds.

By the end of the study period, the researchers documented 349 cockatoos feasting on the colorful nuts. Analyses also revealed that birds within each roosting community seemed to copy one another’s almond-opening technique, which differed somewhat between sites.

Additionally, the data showed differences in social learning between age and sex groups. Males seemed to be more influenced by the behavior of other males, and younger birds tended to be more suspicious of new foods. Juveniles also tended to conform with their peers, preferring the most popular almond color.

The findings could help explain why sulfur-crested cockatoos have flourished in urban areas.

“One key to their success is that they carefully take note of what other cockatoos are doing,” says Michael Chimento, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study, to Amarachi Orie at CNN.

“Interestingly, younger cockatoos (more so than older cockatoos) continue to update their knowledge, and might change their preferences based on what others are doing,” he adds. “This is like how we might, in the moment, change our order at a restaurant depending on what our friends ordered.”

By understanding how cockatoos use social learning to gain new knowledge about food, scientists could perhaps help other bird species in human-altered environments.

“Cockatoos are doing really well, but there are also a lot of parrot species that are actually not doing that well. We have no idea exactly why,” Penndorf tells the Times.

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.