https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WakZWm4xXv0John Pepper might not believe that dancing cockatoos really are dancing, but maybe he's just a wet blanket. What about Leo Joseph, research director of the Australian National Wildlife Collection and one of the world's foremost cockatoo experts? Wrote Joseph,
Thanks for your message and I had a look at the video. I fear that's a bit too much of an anthropomorphic or anthropocentric even view of it. The bird is doing all sorts of head bobbing and body extending that cockatoos do in their displays and it could be doing all sorts of things like reacting as best it can to the presence of the person making the video (?in the hope of getting some food), or indicating alarm at the strange sounds it is hearing in ways that it might do if it were in a flock in the wild or something like that. Too many variables there I'm afraid to single out one of it reacting to music in the way you've described. And then as I watched more, its behaviour seemed to me to have no real relationship to the music and more to its cage or whatever it was working its way around. I'd leave this one well alone if I were you!!!
What is it with these ornithologists, anyways? Whatever happened to their inner child? To heck with science. Those cockatoos are dancing because I say they are!
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