Parrot Facts: Habits, Habitat & Species

Parrots are members of the order Psittaciformes, which includes more than 350 bird species, including parakeets, macaws, cockatiels and cockatoos, according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS). Though there are many types of parrots, all parrot species have a few traits in common. For example, to be classified as a parrot, the bird must have a curved beak, and its feet must be zygodactyl, which means there are four toes on each foot with two toes that point forward and two that point backward. 

Size

Because the parrot order includes so many different species, parrot sizes vary widely. Parrots can range in size from about 3.5 to 40 inches (8.7 to 100 centimeters) and weigh 2.25 to 56 ounces (64 g to 1.6 kg), on average. The world's heaviest type of parrot is the kakapo, which can weigh up to 9 lbs. (4 kg). The smallest parrot is the buff-faced pygmy parrot, which is only about 3 inches (8 cm) tall and weighs just 0.4 ounces (10 g).

Habitat 

Most wild parrots live in the warm areas of the Southern Hemisphere, though they can be found in many other regions of the world, such as northern Mexico. Australia, South America and Central America have the greatest diversity of parrot species. 

With their colorful plumage and ability to mimic human speech, parrots are very popular pets. Some parrot pets have escaped their owners and bred in unusual areas. For example, a popular bird in the pet trade, the monk parakeet, a native of subtropical South America, now resides in the United States after some of them escaped and reproduced in the wild.

Habits 

Most parrots are social birds that live in groups called flocks. African grey parrots live in flocks with as many as 20 to 30 birds.

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Many species are monogamous and spend their lives with only one mate. The mates work together to raise their young. Parrots throughout the flock communicate with one another by squawking and moving their tail feathers. 

Some parrots, like the kakapo, are nocturnal. They sleep during the day and search for food at night.

Diet

Parrots are omnivores, which means that they can eat both meat and vegetation. Most parrots eat a diet that contains nuts, flowers, fruit, buds, seeds and insects. Seeds are their favorite food. They have strong jaws that allow them to snap open nutshells to get to the seed that's inside. 

Keas use their longer beaks to dig insects out of the ground for a meal, and kakapos chew on vegetation and drink the juices.

Offspring

Parrots are like most other birds and lay eggs in a nest. Some species, though, lay their eggs in tree holes,ground tunnels, rock cavities and termite mounds. Parrots typically lay two to eight eggs at one time. A parrot's egg needs 18 to 30 days of incubation before it can hatch, so the parents take turns sitting on the eggs.

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Rainforest Chimpanzees Seen Digging Wells for the First Time

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. The apes have been observed working with tools and can communicate with complex vocalizations consisting of hoots, grunts or roars. Most often, young chimps learn tool use and other behaviors from their elders through social learning. Now, researchers have observed a community of wild East African chimpanzees digging wells after observing the skill from an immigrant chimp from another group. The astonishing research was published in the journal Primates.

The young female named Onyofi arrived at her new group in 2015. Soon after, researchers noticed she began digging wells. Scientists think that she grew up in a well-digging community of chimps before joining the Waibira group in the rainforest, Jason Goodyer reports for Science Focus. Upon seeing Onyofi digging wells, other chimpanzees—both young and full-grown—were interested in the behavior. Dominating males watched her dig and drink from a well, before they drank from it as well. Other female chimpanzees in the Waibira group followed Onyofi's lead and dug, per Science Focus.

No males were observed digging wells, reports Samuel Webb for the Independent. Well digging behaviors have been observed previously in areas with dry habitats, and researchers only know of three chimpanzee groups in the savannah that do so, Hella Péter, says in a statement. “What we’ve seen in Waibira is a bit different from those groups. First, they live in a rainforest, so most people assume getting water shouldn’t be a challenge—but it looks like the yearly few months of dry season is enough to cause some trouble for them! What’s also interesting is that the wells all appear next to open water, so the purpose of them is likely filtering, not reaching the water—the chimpanzees might get cleaner or differently flavored water from a well, which is fascinating,” Péter explains in a statement. 

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Overall, Onyofi’s skill highlights the importance of water as a resource, even in rainforest communities. It also shows the chimpanzee’s behavioral adaptations to changing climates. If rainfall is limited, the apes could dig as their habitats change, per a statement. The team hopes to find out if males will eventually begin to dig their wells. “We’re curious to see what happens once some of the young males who can dig grow older—maybe they will be acceptable teachers for the big males, and they’ll stop relying on others to dig wells for them,” Catherine Hobaiter, study author and primatologist at the St Andrews School of Psychology and Neuroscience says in a statement.

 

 

Woodpeckers Don’t Have Shock-Absorbing Skulls

The birds’ small brain size protects them from getting concussions, a new study finds

About 12 thousand times a day, woodpeckers drill their beaks into trees to search for food, make nests or communicate with other birds. 

“This is basically what the woodpeckers need to do to survive, so if they’re not sleeping and they’re not resting, they are probably pecking on something,” Wesley Hochachka, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, tells Popular Science’s Kate Baggaley. “There’s no respite from it at all.” 

In the scientific community, researchers have widely accepted that the birds have some sort of shock-absorbing mechanism in their heads that allows them to repeatedly smash their beaks against trees without getting a concussion. 

“Blogs and information panels at zoos all present this as fact,” Sam Van Wassenbergh, a biologist at the University of Antwerp, tells the New York Times’ Sam Jones. The birds have even inspired shock-absorbing helmet designs for athletes. 

But this didn’t make sense to Van Wassenbergh. A built-in shock absorption mechanism would hamper the birds’ pecking ability, and they’d need to exert more energy to reach their meals.

“It had to be tested,” he tells Scientific American’s Viviane Callier. 

In a paper published in Current Biology, researchers used high-speed cameras to film three species of woodpeckers hammering into a tree: the black woodpecker, the pileated woodpecker and the great spotted woodpecker. They tracked motion on different points of the birds’ heads to see how they moved in relation to each other. Because a woodpecker’s brain and eye are jammed closely together with little room for movement, researchers tracked the eye to analyze how the birds’ brain moved, per the Atlantic’s Ed Yong. 

If the birds’ skulls absorbed shock, the brain would decelerate slower than the beak. But the team found no difference in movement patterns between the beak and brain—suggesting that the head acted as a stiff hammer rather than a shock absorber. Van Wassenbergh, who’s the lead author on the new paper, says this is logical.

“People don’t use hammers that have a shock absorber built into it; it just makes hammering quite inefficient,” he tells Popular Science. 

So how do woodpeckers repeatedly drum their beaks against trees without getting concussions? 

It has to do with their size, per Van Wassenbergh. 

We forget that woodpeckers are considerably smaller than humans,” he tells the Times. “Smaller animals can withstand higher decelerations. Think about a fly that hits a window and then just flies back again.” A woodpecker’s brain is about 700 times smaller than a human’s, per NPR’s Jon Hamilton. 

The researchers created a model to calculate pressure in the woodpeckers’ skulls. They found that the birds would need to hit wood twice as fast to concuss themselves. 

“That really lays to rest the idea that some part of the head is acting as a shock absorber,” Margaret Rubega, an ornithologist at the University of Connecticut who wasn’t involved in the study, tells The Atlantic. 

Maja Mielke, a biologist at the University of Antwerp and a co-author of the study, tells the Times that this research shows how scientists may need to re-examine commonly held beliefs. 

“It’s always worth looking at phenomena that we believe we are already understanding, because sometimes, there can be surprises,” she tells the newspaper. “Intuition can fool us.”