Transcript of AE 988 - Interview How Cockatoos Are Mastering Dumpster Diving with Dr. John Martin

Welcome to this episode of Aussie English podcast. Today I have Dr John Martin, he is a terrestrial ecologist at the Taronga Institute for Science and Learning, and you are interested in the ecology of wildlife and human dominated landscapes. Before I let you say g'day, how's it going? I saw you in the news obviously recently, and I had to get you on the podcast talking about cockatoos.

But your recent paper, 'Innovation and geographic spread of a complex foraging culture in an urban parrot', got published in Science, which is the pinnacle of publications effectively, right, next to nature. So, yeah. John Martin, welcome to the podcast and congrats. That's- It's huge, mate. Well done.

G'day, Pete. Thanks for that pumping up my tyres. It certainly was a nice achievement for the team and, yeah, everyone loves a good cockatoo story.

So, do you get to retire now? You just tap out. There's no doing that twice. Right. Lightning doesn't strike twice, at least not easily.

I'm certainly not retiring. But, yeah, look, if it happens again in my career, that'll be pretty nice. But, you know, a couple of my colleagues who are co-authors on that paper, they're highflyers, and they publish in Nature and science now, here and there. So, it's good to work with some really, really smart and talented people.

That's the power of networking. Right?

Sometimes it's a bit just like lightning striking, you know, you get a bit lucky, but otherwise, yes, networking is important.

Anyway, so, I wanted to get you on to talk about this paper, but before that can you tell me a bit about where you grew up in Australia and how you ended up wanting to become a terrestrial ecologist? Because that doesn't tend to be the thing that most primary school students, you know, put their hand up and say, this is exactly what I want to do.

Yeah so, I grew up in Sydney, so southern Sydney, the St George area, and we would go on family holidays up in the national park, just, you know, sort of an hours drive North Sydney. And I just always loved being in the water and on the water and fishing and, you know, bushwalking. And so, I ultimately wanted to be a national park ranger and spend my days in the trees.

Did you have a crush on Ranger Stacey, as well, from Totally Wild?

Oh, look, I am a big fan of Ranger Stacey. I don't think I had a big crush on her, but I was pretty excited when I was on a totally wild about 20 years ago as a, you know, in a scientific capacity that, you know, sort of met that childhood dream.

Cheeky flex. Cheeky flex.

I'll try not to name drop too many times as we chat.

No, go to town. I love it. I'll probably know them, too.

So, yeah, it's- Look I just grew up in suburban Sydney and, yeah, you know, as a kid, lots of us have that interest in things like marine biology and especially if you like the water and you think, oh yeah, you watch docos on the Great Barrier Reef. God, how good would it be to be paid to go snorkelling and scuba diving every day.

So, I failed, and I don't do that. But I do research on birds and mammals, and I do get to spend a bit of time in the trees.

So, what caught your eye there in terms of terrestrial vertebrates, you know, things like lizards and birds and everything? Was there a point where you were wanting to be a marine biologist and then there was just some burning question that took you away and you end up going down that path, that rabbit hole?

Yeah so, there were two books that I read in probably the late 90s, and one was Feral Future and the other was Future Eaters. And so, Feral Future by Tim Low is all about the impact on our native species in Australia by invasive species, so the European red fox, cane toad, European rabbits and of course all the weeds.

And so, I got really interested in that ecological framework of thinking about invasion ecology and how we could be helping to conserve our native plants and animals' ecosystems. And then I sort of missed that ticket as well as happens. I mean, it's great working at Taronga Conservation Society now because we do- We have a number of breed for release programmes for the threatened species, so reintroducing them back into the wild.

And so, I'm looking forward to getting more involved in some of those projects that aligns with aspects of the removal of pest species and the restoration of ecological functioning communities.

Why does Australia get it so bad? Because we've been in the news quite a bit recently, haven't we, with a lot of the Brumby stuff, you know, down south here. It tends to be always stories about feral cats and cane toads and goats and pigs and everything and the amount of damage they're doing to the, you know, natural environment here. Is Australia really that unique compared to other countries like the US and everything?

Or do we just have a bad reputation because we have all the cute and cuddly animals?

We're highly vulnerable is actually the answer, I would say. So, you know, we were pretty much a little time locked, little bastion of biodiversity that really didn't have the same pressures and threats in the systems that have been introduced. And so, you know, you just look at rabbits, for example, they are far more fecund, so they breed and reproduce far more rapidly as the saying goes.

And so, they just were able to out-compete native species and similarly with things like foxes, whilst there was the dingo and some really interesting research that shows dingoes being, you know, quite a bit larger than a fox, they ate often larger prey.

And so, those really small mammals that the dingoes didn't really bother with when the fox came along suddenly were just sitting ducks and got wiped out and got impacted twofold by rabbits competing with them for food to eat and also borrowing, but also the foxes eating them, so. And then you add cats to that mix, as well.

And so, yeah, look, there's this high susceptibility, with the plants it's a similar story that- Just that, you know, there's some great research done on the enemy release hypothesis, which is something that Darwin came up with, you know, many moons ago and the whole thing that-

So, those animals, but also those plants, they've been introduced into this landscape, they haven't evolved in this landscape, and they're natural predators or natural pathogen, so diseases and whatnot are far less common or non-existent here. And so, hence you throw out the blackberry seeds when you're walking across the landscape and what happens?

They grow big and bold and strong, and they've got lots of fruit and the birds eat them and spread them and then they grow and grow and grow. So...

What was the name of the guy who did that? Because I remember hearing a story about him saying everyone in the future is going to thank me for- All the hikers in the future will thank me that they'll have this nice food and, your like, mate, the fruit ripens for like a few weeks a year.

I can't remember who it was. But, you know, you've no doubt across the acclimatisation societies, which were ye olde English types who like to recreate the English landscape over here and, you know, we still actually have a fundamental problem with that. We have a lot of people who don't like to necessarily have native gardens and want to grow plants from all over the place.

And we're still importing plants that are going to become weeds in the future, and that is just insanity.

That always blew my mind, you know, that we see the amount of border control, I remember I think there was an ad with Steve Irwin back in the day where he was holding up a tiny little wood mite or something like that and being like, you know, we need to protect our borders from these animals. And yet we don't seem to have the same kind of restrictions at all for foreign plants.

So, there is a process, you can't just bring anything in. It's obviously very difficult, people can bring seeds in their luggage and...

I guess that's an unfair advantage with them. An egg is one thing, but a seeds another.

And so, there is an honour system, we're all in this together with respect to border security. The challenge there, of course, is some people, they might be bringing them in accidentally or, you know, they don't care. But- Yeah, yeah. It's- It blows my mind as well because it's hugely challenging and it's hugely costly, so. It's costly on many fronts, you know, obviously from my perspective, we're talking about biodiversity.

So, we actually have certain species that are potentially going to go extinct, and we've got other species that have gone extinct because of these non-native species. But equally, there is a cost to things like agriculture. And, you know, when you look at some of those economic costs for whether it's growing vegetables or crops, grains or whether it's, you know, lambs being eaten, you know, once things are in, they're bloody hard to get out.

It blows my mind too, some of the situations you hear about in the news. I think it was a guy who had like- They found 150 dead wedge-tailed eagles in his fridge that he shot. And you're just like, the dude's a farmer and he doesn't realise those animals aren't actually, you know, harming- Really harming his livestock. They're potentially eating the ones that are already dead or maybe the odd lamb.

But if you get rid of all the wedgies, you're gonna have way more problems with rabbits and, you know, other vermin that are going to affect your crops and farming and everything. It just- It blows my mind still that the average person doesn't seem to have a good grip of how important this sort of balance is in nature. Right.

Especially if you're a farmer, you're spending your days on the land, years, you know, presumably a lot of farmers have grown up on the land as well, so. These are old mentalities, and so I do some research on flying foxes. And, you know, you talk to people in some areas, and they've all got, you know, if they were of a certain age, so our parents age, perhaps, they've all got a story about going shooting flying foxes.

And it was just something that you did. And so...

Sorry to laugh, it just sort of like it seems crazy to me that you would like, come on, guys, grab your guns.

Yeah. Well look, and so even from a human wildlife conflict perspective, which is something I have an interest in with respect to native animals, but that also relates to the non-native animals.

You know, that literally was what they did in the eighteen hundreds, back in the day, if flying foxes came into town and you didn't want them in your town, you would call everyone up and you will go and shoot a bunch of them, and ideally they would go away.

And, you know, one of the traditional practises around a range of things, whether it's crop protection or even some fishing practises with things like cormorants, was you'd have someone standing there with a shotgun.

And so, you know, this is a very human response because we have that power and those animals, whether it was shooting a cockatoo or a flying fox, isn't of consequence to that human being, but protecting their grain crop or having a good night's sleep is.

And yeah. So, I mean, obviously, we're changing our understanding and a lot of people have a greater appreciation for nature, and, you know, that's really valuable that we do sort of value what we see in our day-to-day lives. The thing that's challenging is how do you value the things that you don't see? And that's where climate change is a big issue.

And, you know, just the idea that forests are being cut down, you know, throughout Southeast Asia or throughout South America. And these are significant issues that we don't necessarily see, and so it's hard to take action and- Anyway, it's easy to be saying some of those things here because we already cut down a lot of the forests. So, you know, we have a fraught world and a fraught situation when it comes to trying to get the balance right.

I remember, I think I've told this story a few times on the podcast, but I did some fieldwork in Sulawesi, in Indonesia, and...

Half your luck!

...It was pretty crazy. But I remember being there and just being, like, blown away at the amount of deforestation and that a lot of the Indonesians who were farmers there just did not give a shit about littering, about the natural wildlife. And I mean, once you go there you understand, it's like, dude, they're trying to survive, they're trying to get enough food to have on the table that-

Their worries aren't whether or not they can throw batteries into the river, like they're used to be a guy who would just be like, gone, it's gone. You just throw it in the river and it's just gone. And I'm like, mate, your towns downstream...

Yeah, you're drinking that.

Exactly, but yeah, it just blew my mind and then you realise, oh, we've gone through that, we've done that, we don't have these areas quite a lot of the time because we already blew through them and there's zero there. So, who am I to judge these countries where they're like, well, this is our resource to do with as we please and hopefully get to your level. But, yeah, it is such a difficult thing. Right.

And I'm sure you've gone for a bushwalk and you've stumbled across a car surrounded by big trees and you're like, how the hell did that get there? And, you know, it's a clear indication those trees aren't that old, you know, this area was clear enough that you could drive a car into it, whether it was only 50 or, you know, 80 years ago. But, you know, cars aren't that common, that it's going to be a much older than sort of 80 years, so.

But, you know, you certainly find rubbish and stuff as well, whether it's tin cans and all sorts of things. So, yeah, absolutely. It's something that we all sort of need to learn a little bit about. And I'll just mention a project I'm involved with, which is called the Urban Food Naturalist Project. And it's all about connecting with nature and sharing your stories.

And so, the premise is in our everyday lives, we all have those moments if we're actually observing the world around us, you know, you might be gardening, you might have just gone for a walk in your lunch break, it could be anything. You know, you might have just seen an amazing leopard slug and you're like, what the hell is that?

Or you got swooped by a magpie, you know, I swim regularly in the ocean and, you know, two days ago, I was swimming along and there were just two Port Jackson sharks swimming along below me, and I was just, you know, really enjoying looking at them as I was cruising along and- Anyway, so, the whole thing is, you know, you put yourself in the story because we're part of nature and...

Does that blow your mind? Sorry to interrupt you. But for so long it seems like humans have been trying to tame the wild, tame nature and get control of it and almost obliterate it. Right. Keep it away. It's dangerous. There are diseases. There are animals that are going to kill you...

Getting Biblical here.

Yeah, exactly. But then at the same time, we're drawn to it, you know, like you look at the average Australian and it's almost like- Sorry, sorry for the average Australian. The more bogan you are, the more you probably like camping and getting into nature, and, you know, there seems to be that kind of stereotype.

So, it seems like it's spread across all of society where we still want a nice garden, we want to see animals, we want to go into nature, we want it there, but we kind of want that control of it. Do you think it's getting better, though? Are we getting- Now are we getting over that sort of hump of doing a lot of damage and reversing that, or do you think it's just going to get worse?

Look, I'd say it's certainly there's a big movement in urban Australia and there's a parallel movement in the farming world about the importance of saving your soils and having water in the system. And so, the challenge is we're still learning about this country, you know, we're still learning about whether it's fire or flood or drought, you know.

And these things are changing, these things are dynamic and there are global pressures that are changing them as well. So, now it's like, oh, well, what we sort of thought was happening has changed. And, you know, things like heat stress events are becoming far more common, and that has an impact on whether it's plants and animals, it also has an impact on us, of course.

So, look, I guess I'm an optimist and you sort of have to be otherwise, you know, you're going to have a pretty shit day.

Or life, right?

Yeah.

If you're just being negative all the time.

So, yeah. And look, you know, it's interesting whether it's just talking to your mates and, you know, they're like, oh, you know, I watched Gardening Australia today. And you're like, really? You watched Gardening Australia. I'm really surprised that. And you're like, you know, God, you really have settled down, haven't you? And so, there are some- There are lots and lots of things out there, I think that are positive.

There's- I guess a lot of its pretty surface deep, though, you know, it's pretty shallow and as a really simple example of that is, lots of people don't know the names of the plants or the animals.

Especially the plants.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a tree.

People are pretty good on their garden plants if they're interested in that. But, you know, beyond that it's, you know, that's a gum, that's an acacia or that's a wattle, let's say. Anyway...

Which would be like going out there being like, oh, look it's a mammal.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly right. Saw a bunch of fish when I was swimming, you know.

Damn, this guy is a biologist or something.

Yeah. Yeah. So- But, you know, that comes down to individuals and the time that you put into those things and also, you know, your upbringing. But I think that, you know, the positive things is who doesn't enjoy that weekend away, whether it is an Airbnb on a farm or in a country town or it is camping.

You know, people- I guess to me that's that whole thing, everyone's got a story because that's actually what people do, is they go for a walk outside, you know, they don't go, oh, I'm going to go- Well, I guess some people go to the shopping centre. But a lot of other people are going to go, oh, I went to the wine region, and we did this really nice tour.

And, you know, in the morning we went for a bike ride through the state forest or went for a bushwalk. And that's literally what most people do when they go on holidays, try and get into nature and try and do that in their lives to some degree. So, I think all those things are positive, I think a lot of it is actually really passive, you know?

People haven't gone I'm going on this epic adventure; they might just think of it as I'm going to the Hunter Valley and I'm going to drink some wine. But you're actually getting out into nature and what are you doing? Oh, look at that. There's some kangaroos in the paddock. That's cool. You know, and that's something you appreciate in the fact that you're not in the city anymore.

It would be really interesting to do a study on people of two populations, one that does get back to nature regularly and then the other that doesn't and is always in the city, you know, 24/7. And to have a look at their, cortisol levels, you know, to see are they getting- Are they more stressed out, or are they more relaxed?

Because there does seem to be that sort of thing where it's almost like you're, you know, I remember going surfing as well once and seeing dolphins out there and it was like sunset. And I was like, I felt like I was stoned or something, you know, just felt like such a sort of spiritual event that you couldn't-

You wouldn't have, like, oh, there I was sitting at the train station and this train came past and I was like, man, I'm up there.

And each to their own, but I'm in the dolphin camp...

Not a train spotter?

...On the train as it goes by isn't the thing that's, you know, making my day. So, you know, as I say, it's each their own. And that's that beautiful thing, I guess at the bare minimum, we all do get out into nature at some point. And whether or not we enjoy it as much as the person next to us, that's a different thing.

Awesome, dude, let's chat about your paper, the recent study that you published, but I- Looking into it, it looks like you've been doing it for quite a few years now, collecting data on cockatoos. And so, I'll let you be the one to tell us the story. What was your recent paper about?

So, hopefully the listeners are familiar with the sulphur-crested cockatoo, which is...

The screams, right? [sulphur-crested cockatoo screech]

Oh, my God. Yeah, you do a good impersonation. Yeah. So, funnily, a friend of mine from South Africa, when she moved over, she was an animal lover and she just...

Was.

Sorry. Is, is. Is an animal lover. Yeah. She just arrived in Sydney, and she heard that, [sulphur-crested cockatoo screech] and she literally turned to someone and said, what's wrong with that bird? We've got to help it. Yeah. And I'm like, what are you talking about? So, yeah, that's what they sound like. They're not known for their melodic song, but...

It's an acquired taste.

Yeah. Yeah. It's very okka. Yeah.

Like Vegemite. Yeah.

Yeah. So, they- So, they're common in a lot of urban areas. They've got that punk crest that they can raise up and down and that's where they get their name, the sulphur being yellow coloured. Otherwise, they're a big white bird and, you know, they're pretty much the size of your forearm or, you know, a little bit bigger depending on how tall you are. And so, they're big unit, they fly in flocks and they're really social.

And that's actually a really key component to this study was that we- One of our colleagues who's a co-author on this, lived down in the Stemal Park area, and he had observed in his suburban area cockatoos opening the lid of the red household bins on bin day to go bin diving.

They would throw the rubbish out of the bin to get to some food, and so it's an unfortunate thing because they are creating some pollution and obviously pissing off some people. But they are- They're scavenging ultimately and getting a free feed. And, you know, there are two things there, some people will go, well, why was there any food in those bins? You know, like shouldn't we be composting...?

Because we waste.

And so, to me, I was a bit like, yeah, I think that's a bit naive. But yeah. So, there's- It's a novel behaviour that hadn't been seen before. And so...

At least in cockatoos, right?

Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. There's certainly a few people that do it. That's...

I was thinking more of the- What are they called, again? The ibis. Yeah. Yeah.

...But- Imagine a bandicoot...

Got any truffles.

Yeah. So, for anyone who's never seen a bandicoot you can go Google that. But yeah, the- And look there's a key difference there, a lot of people are familiar with the bin chicken, the Australian-wide ibis, and I do some research on them as well.

And we've actually got a project called Big City Birds, and it's actually asking the community to report where they're seeing ibis and cockies and the different behaviours like, what they're eating and where they're nesting.

To plug this quickly, it's an app. So, if you guys, you know, got your phone you can download the Big City Birds app and you can, you know, upload sightings and help them with data collection.

Yeah. And this study was informed by the Communities Report. So, you know, Richard saw this bin opening sort of, let's say, 5 years ago and in 2018 with Barbara and Lucy, we did a community survey and really critically, we wanted to know where this bin opening behaviour was happening, but also where it was not happening, and that's key.

And a lot of people, you know, when we tend to do these citizen science projects and ask the community for information, it's very easy to get people- Well, not very- People are more likely to report to you that they have seen something, than they haven't seen something, you know, it's pretty hard to get someone to bother to do a survey to say, haven't seen it, you know.

And- But the absence of this behaviour was really important for understanding the geographic spread through time, because we also had a question about how long have you been seeing this behaviour? And so, this was down in southern Sydney, in the Sutherland Shire. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Sutherland Shire, but there's been-

There's a few memes about blowing up the bridges and towing it out into the ocean and getting rid of the beautiful bogans in the shire. It's a nice part of the world. It's right next to where I grew up in the St George area. But anyway, it's interesting crowd. And little bit further south in the Wollongong region was the- This behaviour was occurring.

And so, then people would tell us when they- That they were seeing it and also how long they've been seeing it. So, what we do then, so just for the people listening, the birds land on the bin, cockatoos have two toes' forwards and two toes back, which allows them to grip. They've got a big beak, and so being the size that they are, I mentioned before, they prop the bin up.

They have a- Like with their beak or with their foot, they look in to see how full the bin is, because they don't want it to be a very empty bin...

Because they get trapped inside.

Potentially. Yeah. And then they've got a few different techniques where they shuffle along the side of the bin whilst holding the lid in their mouth or in their foot and flipping it over, so it's completely open and then they can get into it. So, it's quite a challenging behaviour.

And we actually saw that, you know, people often put out their yellow bin or their green bin at the same time, but the cockies, they were quite, you know, they knew where the food was. So, 90% of the time they were opening bins, they were opening the red bins...

They're so beautifully labelled.

Yeah. And we saw that predominantly it was adult males, that were able to do this, and they're slightly larger. So, the females are just slightly smaller, but juveniles and females could also do this behaviour. But the cool component to this was that it started in a really discreet area of a couple of suburbs, and it spread to over 44 neighbouring suburbs and through a few years.

One of the things that we've learnt through our wing tagging project of cockatoos, which you can report wing tags using the big city bird app, so we learn about individual birds, Pete's gone here, John's gone there, and we can learn about that through time was that cockies don't move very far at all, they're bloody lazy.

And the simple answer there is there's a lot of food in the landscape for them, so they only really move within sort of a five-kilometre radius. Sometimes they'll go, you know, 10 km, but a lot of the time they're only moving within a five km radius. And you think about that and that's your suburb, you know, like, that's- Me walking to my local supermarket is a kilometre away.

They're living in isolation, man. It's COVID lock down, they've only got their five-kilometre radius.

They're very much about the Victorian approach to COVID and the five km radius lockdown.

They don't want to help spread it.

No. So, what that meant was that you had birds in a very discreet area learning from each other, so social learning and learning a specific behaviour of how to open the bins. And then those birds when they disperse, so let's say it was a younger bird and it moved, say, five, ten, let's say ten or twenty km away.

It then taught some of the other birds in that community and they didn't know how to do it, so they then learnt through social learning again. But what we've seen is that in those slightly distant areas, they have different behaviours of how to open the bins. So, you know, I always do it with my beak because I'm from Sutherland.

You always do it with your foot because you're from Stanwell Park, and we know people from Stanwell Park have a foot fetish. So, it's- Anyway, what that then showed was that there are different cultures, and that's- A great analogy for that, that I came up with telling a friend the other day was it- It's a bit like if you grew up in, you know, Hawthorn, well, then you go for Hawthorn. Whereas if you grew up in Geelong, you go for Geelong.

The other analogies in Sydney, we drink schooners. In Melbourne, you drink pints. And that's a cultural difference in those different societies. It's really simple. We just have the culture here of every pub has schooners, whereas in Melbourne every pub has pints.

So, have you thought about doing a genetic study to this as well, to work out if these populations are much more closely related, then I guess, you know, populations that don't, you know, then randomly expected? Because that would sound like you would have individuals that are born in a certain area. They see their parents doing it. They disperse, however far away, and then they end up passing that on to the local cockatoos in that area.

So, it'd be interesting to know, are they actually much more closely related and there's a genetic component to it, as well? Or is it just spreading like, as soon as they see it they're like, boom, locked in, pass that on to the next generation in the next suburb?

Yeah. And so, there's really cool points then. And so, first and foremost is not all of them can do it. So, even if you disperse, you might know of this behaviour, but if you can't do it...

I never got the muscles.

Yeah. It's a bit like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and he ends up trapped on a planet and he's like, well, I come from this really advanced society that has cars and microwaves, but he doesn't know how to build any of those things, so he opens a sandwich shop because they've never eaten sandwiches before.

Just stick with what you're good with.

What you can do. Yeah. But yeah, so it's not spreading like wildfire in that sense because of the fact that it's quite a skilled behaviour. But we are actually doing a genetic study to look at the relatedness of the birds. And so, we've got some preliminary results that show that the birds within a flock are highly related and more- Well, more closely related than the neighbouring flocks.

So, there does seem to be a within flock aspect to the genetics. It's interesting seeing even like three generations of birds, so cockatoos are sexually mature when they're seven, and so you can have like grandmother and daughter and granddaughter in the same flock of 50 birds.

And that's pretty amazing to learn that you can only learn through genetics because, you know, grandma might be 30, she might be 50, you know. I mean, we haven't been doing this study for 30 years, so it's very hard to be able to understand the behaviour of those individuals and the longevity of their- Not just their life, but their existence in a certain location. So, yeah, there's a lot to learn there through the genetics.

I'll mention, though, it's quite cool with the being able to study the individuals, we've got this long-term project where we've got the winning tags on a sample of birds of cockies and turkey, brush turkeys and white ibis. And so, that's great getting reports about them.

But with the cockies for this particular bin opening study, what we did is we would habituate the birds to be fed by us and then we would paint them on their backs with individual colour combinations that we could just dab on with some make up sponges, so that they could all be quickly resighted and know that, you know, there's Pete and there's John.

And then we could say, oh, Pete's really good at opening the bin, he keeps going and opening the bin. And yeah. So, that was a really quick and non-invasive way to do it. And that, you know, when the birds moult, which they do every year, that paint disappears. And then getting the genetic sample, as you can imagine, for most studies, you would either take a blood sample, but birds are quite nice. You can get a feather sample.

It's quite useful.

Just scare them. Right. And then they just drop them everywhere.

You might think that, but- We actually, because they were so habituated, you could just pluck two feathers out. Yeah.

You didn't get bitten or anything. I feel like I would not do that to a cockatoo.

You've got to time it right, but the best thing is that they often turn around and look at the next cockatoo and are like, what did you just do? And they think it's an aggressive interaction. And so, often they'll then turn into the next bird and give it a bit of a what for. And yeah.

So, it's- But it was really, you know, a really fortunate situation because of the fact that these birds are so adapted to humans and regularly foraging from humans, like going to people's houses or balconies and being hand fed. Yeah, so there's some really- they lend themselves for this study, it would have been much harder to do this with other birds.

Especially wild ones like that, like wild, wild ones. Right. You don't realise how much when you see birds in a city environment, you can get so much closer to them than if you were to look for sulphur-crested cockatoos in the forest. Right. They would see you from trees away and be like, yeah, I'm out of here, guys.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, I do research on white ibis in the city, but also out in the Western wetlands. And we catch them out in the wetlands, but they're nesting at the time and...

Yeah.

...And they'll see you from a hundred metres away and just all fly away. So, then you set snares on their nests and then you have to go and hide in the vegetation, and you wait for the birds to come back. And then when you're all ready you go, and you have to then grab those birds. And, you know, you're in waders, you're running through the water, through the vegetation and- Anyway, yeah, it's a lot of fun.

But it's also a bit of a hit and miss situation because it's not a perfect system. But, yeah, those birds, you know, the exact same species, but different individuals. We don't see the birds out west coming to the city very often. They come to the coast, but not necessarily to the city. And yeah, they have absolutely no tolerance of people. You go into those- Their habitats and they're just like, everyone...

It's time to go.

...Those freaking apes again. Let's get the hell out of here.

I'm conscious of your time, we're at 30 minutes, but have you got time for a few more questions?

Yeah, yeah.

But well, I spoke to Sean Dooley, and I'm the one name dropping now, a while back, and he told me the story of the white ibis and how they became the bin chicken, you know, correct me if I'm wrong. But apparently, he was saying they started in Healesville Sanctuary in the 1950s at the zoo there where they learnt to eat out of bins.

And then I think they got moved to- I don't know if it was Taronga Zoo, or it was a zoo near Sydney, and then they ended up getting out of that zoo and then that behaviour spread. Did that spread in a similar way to the way that it's happening with cockatoos? Where it was just, they saw other individuals doing it and they were like, you know what? This is so much easier. Just eat out of the bins, guys.

So, Sean knows that story because I told him that story. No, he's a good guy. He's- Look, it's- He's spot on there. The chicken and egg scenario there is really difficult to understand. And that's one of the really nice things about this current study, is that we could observe it in essentially real time. And if we could wind back the clock and observe what happened with the ibis, it would be really fascinating. So, yeah.

So, Healesville Sanctuary, they actually did grab some chicks from the wild in the 60s it was. And then they brought them into the zoo. They were one of the first native species to be independently, successfully nesting in a zoo, and they were pretty stoked about that. And then they just kept breeding and...

Low hanging fruit, guys. This was easy.

Yeah.

They're ibis.

Well, they didn't know that in the 60s. And so, then they released them into their own zoo grounds, thinking that they would leave, but they ate all the other animals' food.

Why would we go?

Yeah. And then they had the great idea of shipping them to Currumbin Sanctuary on the Gold Coast, Tidbinbilla in Canberra and Taronga in Sydney.

Yeah.

That was in the early 70s.

Wow, okay. So- It's so crazy to think that was 50, 60 years ago from now. And that behaviour's still here.

Yeah, well, it didn't take off that quickly. And so, with those releases, they were released, I'm pretty sure all three sites, but definitely at Taronga into the grounds.

Yeah.

They were not released into an enclosure. They were just like; they'll just hang around and people will get to see them. And this will be great...

Huge draw card.

...Interesting bird. Yeah. Come to the zoo and see the ibis.

I take it's not performing that well anymore. I imagine not many people are going to Taronga because of the ibis.

Look, it's certainly not something we advertise. It's one of those free benefits that you get when you come to the zoo. You get a really close encounter with the ibis.

The unpleasant surprise.

Yeah. Well, again, if you're lucky, we've actually, like I've mentioned, the wing tags, but we've also got colour banded ibis. And so, I see the odd colour banded ibis that I banded back in, say, 2007...

Wow.

...As at least a three-year-old at that time, they could have been ten at that time. But all I could age them as they're an adult and three that's based on their plumage. And like that bird was caught in Hyde Park, it's got colour bands on, you know, you are sitting there, and you go, well, this birds at least 17 years old and it just still goes and eats with the tigers. This bird loves to, you know, live life dangerously.

Nah, they can't get in with the tigers. They've got fully fenced... I mean, they do it with the elephants. I watch them in there with the elephants. I'm like, why can't I just go walking around with the elephants? That'd be nice. But obviously, the birds are pretty quick to get away if there was any trouble. But yeah, so then they were released in Sydney and whatnot.

And it, you know, it wasn't till over a decade later in the 80s that we started to see increasing numbers of ibis in the Sydney region. And that was really slow. It's really actually the late 80s and then into the 90s where we're talking about we've gone from so zero to tens of ibis to across the Sydney region, having about a thousand ibis in the early 90s. And that then changed quite dramatically over the next 20 years.

And so, now we see sort of seven or eight thousand ibis in the Sydney region. I know some people listening might be like, nah, there's way, way, way, way, way more than that. But...

They're the same ones, guys.

If You go and count them, which I've spent many a day doing, yeah there's, you know, we've counted up to ten thousand and that varies seasonally as well with breeding. But the best place to see ibis is the landfill, and if you go to a landfill, you'll see, you can see hundreds to even a couple of thousand ibis. And it's pretty amazing, you know, that's all our waste. That's all food that we've not eaten and put in the bin.

And it's just a daily buffet that gets refreshed.

We just need to start eating the ibis and the circle will be complete.

Pete, you go first.

Well, that...

Because they stink, they literally do stink.

Leads on to the point that I was going to make about, I think I was reading a paper on the ibis saying that the ones that live in the cities and eat the rubbish end up having a much worse diet, obviously, and their health is a lot worse than if you were to find one in nature. If that's the case, are you expecting to see the same thing occur with cockatoos in the future?

If you were to do some analyses on their, you know, the health of either their counterparts in- In the natural environment versus in the city, now that they're eating a lot more rubbish out of bins, would you expect to see a dive in their health? And if that was the case, what's the benefit to them doing that if they're going to be unhealthy? Right.

Yeah. And so, just stepping back, I think the study you're referring to was looking at toxins in their eggs and it looked at- Is that correct?

It was a while ago. So, it could be. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, that's environmental toxins that they're ingesting, and they could be ingesting some of those in urban areas, in creeks and wetlands and, you know, our polluted environments as opposed to just from their food. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there isn't a study that's looking at the dietary impact on their physical health, it was on the eggs. But I could be wrong, that happens often.

The- So, look with the ibis and the cockies, the landscape is a buffet, and you choose to eat what you want and what's available at the time. The reality is with bins, those bins go out once a week. And so, you've got, you know, Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning to try and get to the bins...

Have at it, guys.

Yeah. And so, you know, of course, people will if they can, they'll put they're bin out late, you know, the next morning or after sunset. And so, and quite often as you experience the garbage trucks, they're off pretty early. So, there's actually a pretty short window. The ibis of course is quite different because they can be scavenging day in, day out. And I literally could go to a landfill and see one there every day.

So, you don't think the cockatoos are going to be in a rush to go to the landfill, the tip and then displace the ibis?

Look as I said, they're lazy. They don't want to fly that far. Whereas we saw ibis flying 35 kilometres across Sydney to go to a landfill in the west of Sydney and then flying back again. So, that's- And that's like point to point. So, now that they flew other hot spots as well. You know, if you've flown 70 km just to go and scavenge some bin food when you could literally not- This was from Centennial Park and Sydney.

People- That's a bird feeding mecha. You could have just sat there and been thrown white bread all day and then go to the pond and eat some worms or, you know, catch a fish or whatever. But, you know, there are other benefits to going to the disco as the landfill could otherwise be called. But yeah, so...

You don't want to- Do you want to be more explicit, or you just leave it there, don't bother, just next?

It's an aggregation. If you've got hundreds of birds, you get to, you know, maybe get to catch up with some friends.

There's a lot of broken beds at the tip.

There's not a lot of mating going on at the tip, that's for sure. That happens at the breeding colonies. But yeah, look, with the ibis, it's really interesting, even just observing birds in, say, Hyde Park in Sydney. We did a study where we looked at their foraging behaviour on rainy days versus dry days. And, you know, it's a bit of a no-brainer.

On a rainy day, there were no people out because it's raining, and so there wasn't opportunities to scavenge food. What did they do? They ate a ton of worms because when it's wet, the worms come to the surface and they're more accessible. Dry day, two days later, everyone's back sitting on the grass eating some noodles. What do the ibis do? They try to eat noodles. So, you know, they're really adaptable.

But what you'd see is even on those days when there's noodles available, they're still eating some worms and eating some natural foods. And the cockies most definitely are eating a bunch of natural foods and a very small proportion of bin food. And, you know, the other thing that's readily available for cockies is a lot of people do feed them...

Yeah.

...The old classic, given the Sayo or, you know, butterscotch or something, you know, what are those ones? Milk Arrowroot. That's the one.

The ibis are just standing there like, how did you guys? You bastards. Like I wish we were cute enough and didn't stink as much as we did to get hand fed.

Look, and so this goes back to our conversation before about connection to nature and, you know, people's appreciation. Look, we're all judgy. People like cockies because they've got character and they interact a bit with you. Like an ibis has character and it will interact with you, but people aren't as appreciative and don't reciprocate as much when it comes to that.

So, yeah, I certainly encourage people to increase the love of the Australian flamingo, aka the bin chicken and...

Throw them a Sayo.

Yeah, I don't think they want a Sayo. They don't have the equipment to chomp it. That's their challenge. But yeah. So, yeah, I certainly talk to a lot of people, people ask me about bird feeding and whatnot, and I guess the simple comment there, since we've talked about it a bit, is birds don't need the food. So, if you're feeding birds, you just need to know that that's actually a human thing.

And you are doing that for you, and you should be enjoying your moment with those animals. And you should do it in moderation, because what we see with particularly, say, the wing tagged cockies is they'll just fly from house to house to house to house in the morning and in the afternoon because they know someone else is going to feed them. So, they get a feed, then that person stops and then they fly to the next house and they get another feed.

And then, you know, everyone goes to work. Not at the moment in lockdown. But people go to work and the cockies go and forage naturally, or they go and just chill out and sit in the shade of a tree. And then they go, ah, okay afternoon time, I'll go get some more food.

So, what separates the individuals that end up living that life in, you know, the urban Australia and the same species who just live, say, in the natural environment, but on the outskirts? What prevents them from just coming in exactly the same way? Why isn't it just this grain of just animals constantly coming into the cities?

The classic single source question. Yes. So, one is you do what you know. If you were born in out near Woolgar, and you love foraging on oat crops and other things like that, you know, you don't know that you could fly- What is it? 500 kilometres and go to Sydney and just be and be hand fed, you know, cashews and peanuts and all this sort of stuff.

You'll hate, too, if you're a cockatoo that lives for like a hundred years at times and then only at the end of your life did you discover that. You bastards were holding out the whole.

And so, you know, I think that one's a really interesting one with respect to the ibis, because they do fly really long distances and they have this boom-and-bust cycle where flooded wetlands out west dry up. And so, they have to move hundreds of kilometres away. And yeah, we don't see them all just going to the city. We do see them move to some coastal areas, and so we talk about the coast as being a drought refuge.

But it's not even just drought. It's, you know, there are years that aren't necessarily drought years, that there aren't good options out west. So, yeah, and sorry, just to digress onto that, because we've mentioned ibis a few times, but it's just, you know, that whole thing about going back to that story of their introduction to Sydney and the spread of the behaviour, it would have been great to have seen the spread of the behaviour.

But the thing that I also find really interesting is, how did the word spread? Because you would think that what you've just asked about is birds moving from out west or non-urban areas but moving into the city is a fundamental component of the ibis population increasing in the city.

I don't think it was all through breeding, you know. I don't think we went from, you know, 14 birds or 14 pairs of birds being released in 1973 to having ten thousand birds in 2010. You know, that would be pretty successful breeding programme. But...

Those tips.

Yeah. And we know that with the juvenile ibis from historic banding data from the 50s that they had birds moved from the western wetlands up to northern Queensland, Northern Territory, even Papua, so this species occurs outside Australia. And we saw that with some chicks that we banded in Sydney in 2004 that were subsequently seen up in near Townsville, in north Queensland.

So, they're the real dispersers, the adults also we've now seen with satellite tracking and GPS tracking of adults out in the western wetlands that we've had birds move, you know, through Victoria, into South Australia, Queensland, even up into the NT.

And so, you know, they'll move a couple of thousand kilometres if they want to. That's no big deal for an ibis. And so, birds will have gone from the city, potentially the chicks, you know, once they started breeding in the city, potentially the chicks then dispersed out of the city, met up with some other ibis and said, you've got to come to the city. You know what's there, it's just a- It's paradise of beans and- Yeah.

And when did that bin foraging behaviour start? And, you know, with the bins for the ibis, of course, it's open bins, they're not opening bins they're just sticking their necks into an open bin and pulling things out.

Which makes it sound like a pretty easy solution, right, for Sydney if they really wanted.

Hey look, I don't know if you've seen the Olympic mascot for 2032 for Brisbane is the bin chicken. Yeah. And, you know, the rings match the different coloured bins that we've got. So, you've got your red and your green, yellow and blue, so yeah.

You just need a lobby to make that happen.

There's a movement afoot. I'm not in charge of it. But, you know, if you want to get behind it, then that'd be great.

Patreon links below, guys.

Yeah. So, yeah, it's- It is something that we were really lucky with the cockies to be able to see it in real time. And with the ibis, you know, these are all adaptive behaviours, and they are sort of- There's an element of social learning there because again, it's through observation.

Final question for you, and I'm aware I've kept you quite a while. Why are parrots, in particular cockatoos so smart? And not only just smart, but seem to have a sense of humour? Because it blows my mind when I see crows, you know, corvids doing these things like solving puzzles and flipping up cane toads to eat underneath because it's not toxic. But they don't- They still seem to be like planks of wood.

There's not much going on there, at least in terms of humour. Whereas cockatoos, it's like any time you see one, you just sit there and watch them, and you're bound to shit yourself, like you're going to laugh at some point. There's going to be something that they do that just makes you just laugh.

Alright. Well, I think you should see a medical doctor about your laughing problem. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. They- Look, the sulphur-cresteds in particular are real characters. But so are lot of the others, the corellas, the galahs. The black cockatoos don't have as much character, arguably, but they make up for it a lot in style. So, you know, some of the best dressed birds getting around.

Look, so play is a really interesting thing that we're doing some research on and we want to do some more work on, and this, you know, one of the behaviours that hopefully everyone has seen is, is cockies hanging upside down on power lines and just, you know, throwing their crest up and down and beating their wings and just screaming.

And then they literally climb back up and then they just will go and swing over again like they're an acrobat and they're just sort of doing little loops. And it's a bit like, you know, yourself on the monkey bars or whatever back in the day and, you know, you see all the little kids in the park, and you put a put a pole up at, you know, one metre high and every kid is going to swing on it. And...

How many videos are there on YouTube of the cockatoos with their crests up like headbanging to music. Right. And they seem to know, like they know they're getting a reaction from you, which is even more uncanny. Right.

And so, I really enjoy that aspect of watching them because I see that they're watching us. Yeah. And so, they're very observant birds. So, to answer your question, they're long lived is one of the reasons why they- Not why they play, but why they're intelligent, you know, not everything that's long lived is intelligent, but. So, that's one attribute of more intelligent species as being long lived.

Another is being social. And so, if you're spending all day in with, you know, a flock of birds, that could be 50 or 100 birds, it could be more. You know, you've got to know stuff, like who's going to beat you up or, you know, who's nice or whatnot. And so, we do some research into social hierarchies and there is an absolute pecking order. And every bird seems to know where they fit in this pecking order.

And, you know, that takes intelligence to know whether or not you should be, you know, oh, God, I'm standing too close to Pete. You know, he always craps himself when he laughs...

It happens, guys.

And so, those two things are really important. There are a couple of other key features there with respect to intelligence, but yeah. I can't think of them off the top of my head right now.

It's just crazy, though, because it seems like it's a bit of a dead end for intelligence, unfortunately. Because they've got no- They don't have any thumbs. Right. So, they're never going to get- They're never going to create spaceships or, you know, they must wake up and just be like, oh, shit, I got wings, you know, when they get born and then finally work it out. And they're just like, all right, we're just going to head bang.

It's just going to be 70 years of head banging and swinging around because it's my only outlet.

Yeah, look, and it's a tough one. You know, chimps are the sort of one of the other classics, they do have thumbs, though. So, you know, it's- I don't know. We'll see. In what time frame are we going to get chimps building spaceships? It's going to be an interesting one.

All right. Well, thank you so much John Martin for being on the podcast. How can people find out more about you're doing- More about what you're doing? Is there anything you want to plug? Is there any app or programme that people can get involved with to help out?

Yeah. So, if people are on the socials, we've got the Urban Field Naturalist Project, we also got the Big City Birds Project. So, you can find those on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. And I'm also on there a bit with wing tags. And so, I'm on Instagram and Twitter and Wayward Ecology on Facebook.

But yeah, there's- A lot of that's just talking about the stuff that we're observing with the research and with the Urban Food Naturalist Project. We actually, you know, share your stories. So, if you write a story, Pete, and it's up to our high standards, then- Sorry, the standards aren't that high and we do provide some editorial assistance, so people are encouraged to write their little 200-word stories.

It's- If it's something that appeals to you, then that's something we encourage. And that's- Yeah. It's nice to be just getting people to be thinking about biodiversity, so plants and animals in their life and connecting with it. So, whether it's feeding the cockies or whether you're the kind of person who prefers to go and feed the ibis, you know. You can be my friend either way.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, John. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks. Good to have a chat, Pete. You have a great arvo.