Very cool! And an awesome project. Working from home, I spend a lot of time on my computer with birds around and I have seen similar responses. In the attached picture, rescued baby pigeon Gypsy was tempted by seeing a video of herself eating to try and sample the seeds on the screen. 8 ] Elizabeth On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Jonathan Harris < jonathanharris@earthlink.net> wrote:

One of my summer projects is to go through QuickTime videos of the flock and compile at least an index or table of contents: for each video clip I'm writing a 1-line description including date, which bird(s) are involved, and the subect of the clip (behaviors or vocalizations recorded). After 4 years, I have literally thousands of these "home movies," which record a bunch of (I hope) useful information on vocalizations, body language and other behavior. Eventually, I hope to get pertinent information into a data base format, but for now I just want to get the videos catalogued, so I can search for certain subjects more effectively. This is still a big undertaking, involving many hours of watching, so I I'm doing it in stretches over a period of several weeks.

Because there's so much to go through, it's practically impossible to avoid having the birds around as I watch on my computer. So they have been seeing and hearing themselves on the screen, and their reactions have been pretty interesting. It's obvious how attuned they are to what's playing, certainly to the sounds of their voices and ours, and I suspect also to some visual images. They quickly pick up on specific vocalizations and perhaps images, and they seem to perceive, intuit, or remember whole contexts in which things happened. When videos showed the birds doing contact calls, for instance, they responded in kind; when a video showed alarm calls because of a cat outside, everybirdy watching it freaked out; when the subject of the video was food, they (especially Paco) started demanding nuts.

The most touching episode was when I was watching a video clip showing Kiko the canary (who now lives in a special-needs situation in another room, where the parrots don't see him that often); his old friend and cagemate Chulo the cockatiel was sitting on my shoulder and started tongue smacking in the way he does whenever he sees a friend.

But the most interesting episode was having one of the birds clarify, interpret or translate what another was saying or doing on the screen. I was watching a video of our BCC Joey pacing back and forth on top of his cage; he was looking basically friendly, happy, and animated; he was yammering away about something in indistinct syllables, although neither his words nor the meaning of his actions were at all clear. As I was watching, puzzling about this, our other BCC, Paco, who was sitting on my shoulder watching with me, said "Nut!" And about 20 seconds later in the video, Joey started asking for a nut. So by whatever means, whether intuition or an understanding of the vocalizations or words pronounced by another conure, Paco had understood and explained to me the meaning of the video before I had understood it.

Jonathan

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