Parrots who learn to video call feathered friends feel less lonely, study finds

Polly want a cracker? Maybe after a FaceTime catchup with an old friend.

According to a recent study at Northeastern University in Boston, parrots that have been taught to contact their feathered peers with a video call app showed signs of feeling less isolated or lonely.

Parrots are a highly social species, said Northeastern University assistant professor and co-researcher Rébecca Kleinberger.

Many parrot species live in large flocks — when they live with humans, they’re usually isolated from other birds. That can lead to heightened loneliness and boredom.

“When they’re kept as pets, very often they’re the only bird in the household,” she said. “They do not have the opportunity to develop their own species identity.” 

The parrots were taught the association between ringing a bell and their owner bringing an iPad with a selection of birds. Then, the parrot could choose which one they’d like to call via video. 

It was important to allow the parrots to choose which of their “friends” to call, according to Kleinberger.

Rebecca Meagher, assistant professor at Dalhousie University’s Department of Animal Science & Aquaculture, said similar experiments could benefit other social animals. 

She said similar work has been done before, involving showing videos of other animals to primates.

“Finding new ways to allow social contact when animals can’t actually be housed with other members of the species certainly has the potential to benefit the welfare of social species,” said Meagher, who was not involved in the study. 

“This type of technological approach has potential applications to many animals kept as companions or in zoos and on farms if they have to be housed alone.” 

‘Different behaviours’ 

The study took about three months. But it also included a three-week meet-and-greet session, where they were familiarized with other bird friends involved in the study.

Some caught on quickly, but it took longer for others to get introduced. 

“It took a little while,” she said. “For others it took longer to understand that they really had this choice.” 

This research is relatively new: the researchers believe this might be the first study of animal-to-animal video calling.

Parrots display neophobic tendencies, Kleinberger said, which means they’re reluctant to try new things. 

But she mentioned that while a wide range of behaviours was exhibited during the study, most of the birds mostly reacted positively. 

“We were worried there might be some stress involved,” she said. “So we had a lot of safety protocols in place in case they got scared or aggressive.” 

“Either they would start to show off, or they would start to mimic each other or imitate each other through the call,” she said, mentioning that some of the birds even called each other by their names.

“Others were quite calm and they would come close to the screen, fall asleep next to the screen — so a lot of different behaviours.” 

Ethical implications 

Georgia Mason, director of the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph, has done work in the past that involved parrot welfare.

Mason, who was not involved in the study, said that video calls could help parrots’ wellbeing, but it would help to keep those interactions consistent beyond the study’s time frame. 

She said oftentimes, humans try to enrich the lives of captive animals with “proxies of what they would have in nature.”

“It might make you think, ‘well why don’t we give them the real thing?'” she said.

Although some ethical concerns were raised — including whether the video calls might stress out the birds instead — the team didn’t want to suggest that “you can just put a screen in front of their bird and everything is gonna go well,” Kleinberger said. 

Kleinberger said that the experiment was never meant to replace natural parrot socialization.

The team made sure that there wasn’t a risk for the parrots to become bonded through the screen. They limited the amount of calls to make sure their owners could limit interactions if needed. 

“Given the fact that there are so many parrots that are already living in those situations, we wanted to see how we could leverage technology to improve their quality of life,” Kleinberger said.