This prompted me to read more about Goffin's cockatoos. Fascinating birds! Apparently one has even learned to "read": https://www.academia.edu/43144584/Reading_Comprehension_Skil...

Found an article about that particular bird. She can also write a bit... and given that she's relatively young, chances are she'll still learn to do much more: https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/28/magazine/cockatoo-p...

Ive been pondering lately that as we've learned more about corvid intelligence and the ability for birds to discern a wide variety of calls with a great degree of accuracy, the old insult "bird-brain" has aged rather poorly. They seem to be much smarter than we gave them credit for all the way to the unfortunately named dodo bird and its old inaccurate depiction that took hold in public conscience.

Now apparently they have an similar thing to our proprioception(tho hard to tell if as accurate as ours) if I'm understanding the abstract correctly.

A related paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-57007-1

Sensitivity to permanent non-functionality in Goffin’s cockatoos

Oh cool. I’m going to try this with my Conure at home. I hadn’t thought about “BAO” as a test before, we’ve done all sorts of little things in front of the mirror to see if he responds.