references
The Kea
Corey Mosen
Kea are magnificent creatures, often known for their mischievous antics and bold personality. But their endangered status, bright plumage, and their unique intelligence, is something most people are unaware of. This book illustrates the beauty of kea and their natural environment, as well as providing some basic insights into their world. The photographs it contains have been collected over the years by Corey Mosen, who, with the help of the Kea Conservation Trust have gathered information to insert in the pages that complements the photos. Corey has been working with kea through the Kea Conservation Trust and the Department of Conservation for many years now and this book shows some of the stunning locations where he gets to spend time working.
For those interested, this book is now available to purchase through the Kea Conservation Trust – www.keaconservationtrust. co.nz or via Corey’s website www.
coreymosen.co.nz. Proceeds from any sales will be redirected back towards the KCT to help continue the various conservation projects that they manage.
Exploratory development in kea – not so different from us?
Dr Gyula Gajdon – Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria
Collaborations with French universities, supervised by Raoul Schwing from our part, are currently looking into cooperative behaviour in kea. Although this is an area in which I thought kea would not display the best performance (as their biology does not predispose them to do so), nevertheless, some of the birds succeeded in a task where up to four of them had to cooperate in order to solve a problem which an individual kea would find impossible to achieve. This might highlight the cognitive buffer large brains provide for coping with unusual challenges of phylogenetically novel tasks, which evolution did not prepare them specifically for. Big brains seem to be a general purpose system for generating novel responses. Similarly, our scientific colleagues were impressed how our kea managed to operate a touch screen device instantaneously. Stepwise training to approach and touch the screen is required in neophobic corvids. For kea, all that is required is to offer them the device and move the cursor a little bit in order to focus their attention on a stimuli - and off they go. Touch screens have become standard in comparative research on animal cognition. We compared the progress of learning and reversing what is learned in a task on a touch screen with a task using solid objects. This research was published this year (O’Hara, M., Huber, H., & Gajdon, G.K. (2015). The advantage of objects over images in discrimination and reversal learning by kea (Nestor
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