Bruce the kea is missing his upper beak. This makes the olive green parrot look a little like he’s always surprised. But scientists are even more shocked at what he can do in spite of his injury.
Bruce has been missing the upper part of his beak since at least 2012. That’s when he was rescued as a fledgling. This young bird, just at the age he was learning to fly, went to live at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch. That’s in southern New Zealand.
Long, sharp beaks help keas rip plant roots out of the ground and pry insects out of rotten logs. Bruce’s injured beak means he couldn’t forage on his own. Bruce also shouldn’t be able to keep his feathers clean. Normally these birds use their beaks to preen. But zookeepers noticed that Bruce had figured out how to preen by using small stones.
First, he looks for his tool among pointy pebbles. He then rolls a few rocks around in his mouth with his tongue until he finds one that he likes. He holds the chosen pebble between his tongue and lower beak to then pick through his feathers.
This behavior didn’t come from the wild. When Bruce arrived at Willowbank, he was too young to have learned how to preen. And no other bird in the aviary uses pebbles this way. “It seems like he just innovated this tool use for himself,” says Amalia Bastos. Now at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., she researches how animals perceive the world.
Bastos came to the Willowbank reserve in 2021 to study keas, which live in New Zealand’s alpine forests. That year, she and her coworkers reported Bruce’s grooming trick in Scientific Reports.
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