references
notabilis). Anim Behav 101, 51-60). We are interested in this kind of comparison in order to evaluate whether both tasks are measuring the same dispositions in kea. Individual kea that learn quickly to discriminate between two stimuli on the touchscreens are also fast at reversing the preferences for the stimuli on the touch screen when rewarding is reversed. And the same individuals are also fast when learning to discriminate between two solid objects. But despite these correlations there is no clue as to which kea will be fast in reversal learning with solid objects. Thus, when interacting with solid objects, there seems to be additional motivations at play. This may be linked with their foraging biology that is also extractive, for example when they dig for roots. Tool-use behaviour is considered to be the golden crown of object manipulation. Although kea are not common tool users in the wild, contrary to New Caledonian crows for example, all our captive birds innovated simple forms of tool-use behaviour and some of them even managed to use sticks as tools. In a study published recently we describe how our captive kea were interested in playfully combining objects before they innovated tool use. For example, they enjoyed inserting toddler toys into empty tubes in exactly the same way that would assist in food acquisition later. Epstein showed that pigeons, when presented with a picture they had to peck at in a place they couldn’t reach directly, spontaneously pushed a box below
the picture, climbed the box and pecked it for receiving a food reward. But the pigeons only spontaneously assembled all these parts of the solution to a functional sequence when they were shaped with food rewarding to learn the individual parts of the solution separately beforehand. The picture of innovative capacity demonstrated by our kea is rather different from this. Like human toddlers, the kea showed an intrinsic motivation to explore spatial relations between objects, and this fostered their tool-use acquisition without the need for being food rewarded for all steps. This reveals a completely different generative capacity. It is a special pleasure for me to show our students videos of how similar playful objects combining is between our captive kea and my daughter Anneli when she was a little bit older than one year. This has also implications for husbandry
management of kea. We currently keep a group of nineteen kea plus three chicks in our 2100m3 outdoor enclosure. We have two outbred breeding pairs after a time of discontinuing breeding activity in our group. Our breeding pairs are housed in compartments at both ends of the 52m long aviary. The wooden walls separating the breeding compartments and the area for the remaining group in between are fitted with sliding doors. The idea is to give the breeding males in particular daily access to the group during the breeding season, in analogy to the bigger home range of males in the wild. Captive breeding pairs are often separated for life in Europe, and it is my impression that this does not suit such gregarious and explorative birds. To date we have not scientifically investigated welfare in our kea lab; however, our husbandry system is a result of our experience as zoologists working with kea both in captivity and the wild. Keeping kea is a dynamic system, and we hope to achieve some milestones in respect of measuring stress levels noninvasively by analysing corticosteroid metabolites in feces, as is done in other birds. This will be particularly interesting in regards to those kea that have lost their mates, as well as to seasonal stress levels that affect foraging activity and breeding. And finally, I hope my own second paternity leave will result in additional new video samples of how similar cognitive and behavioral development is in kea and human toddlers!
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