references
popular tourist stop near the Otira Viaduct in Arthur’s Pass where kea are known to hang out. To study their behaviour, I presented wild kea with three different experiments to freely interact with.
‘rogue kea’ hypothesis is founded, exploration-avoidance may have a role to play in the behaviour of kea towards sheep.
Puzzle Box
I then gave the kea an innovative problem-solving task in the form of a puzzle box. The puzzle box (or Multi-Access Box) had four possible solutions to the problem of retrieving half a peanut in a shell from a plexiglas box: pulling a string, opening a window, inserting a marble or inserting a stick. Discovering new ways to obtain new food sources (such as attacking sheep) is a form of innovative problem-solving, and the puzzle box provides a way to measure this ability in kea.
Kea Personality
An important part of this project is to determine what role individual kea play in kea strike. There is a long-standing theory that ‘rogue’ kea are chiefly responsible for attacking sheep, and one of the aims of this study is to examine the validity of this theory to help inform kea management policy and decisions. Therefore the first experiment I presented to the kea involved novel objects (such as robust dog toys, anchored to a board) to look at the possible role of the explorationavoidance personality trait in kea strike. Exploration is an important behaviour for kea survival, and kea are considered to be a highly exploratory species. I studied this trait in wild kea for my Master’s and found that they exhibit it, and if the
a sheep. I’ll measure the responses of individual kea to this analogue and compare them with their exploratory and innovative problemsolving abilities to see how these behavioural factors are related, and whether there is a combination of these behavioural traits that makes them more likely to attack sheep than others.
Social Behaviour
In addition to these experiments, I’ll look at the role of social behaviour in relation to the other behaviours studied. Kea are a highly social species and social behaviour may be tied to problem-solving and foraging behaviour, and therefore to kea strike.
Progress to Date: Mechanical Sheep Analogue
Finally, I wanted to see how kea reacted to a bucking mechanical sheep analogue. The analogue is activated by pulling cables attached to it and can be made to buck, providing kea with stimuli similar to I am currently analysing the large amount of video footage I collected for this research. Kea engaged with all of the experiments, and it will be fascinating to see how the data unfolds. What I can tell you so far is that they could really get into
Figure 2. Multi-Access Box apparatus (modified from Auersperg et al. 2011) used for testing innovative problem-solving. The box used in this study consisted of a wooden frame with four plexiglas walls with openings corresponding to the four possible solutions (string, window, marble and stick). A food reward (half a peanut in the shell) presented in the centre of a transparent box can be retrieved by one of four possible methods, which are built into the four walls of the MAB: opening a window, pulling a string, inserting a ball or inserting as stick tool. Once a kea has solved one of the four tasks, the wall corresponding to that task can be blocked to prevent it from being used. The kea appeared to favour throwing the sticks and marbles around rather than trying to use them to get the peanut out of the box. Photo: Kate McInnes.
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