April 30, 2009 -- Birds can boogie to the beat, according to two new studies that found birds, especially parrots, have rhythm and an apparent appreciation for certain songs that compel them to bob their heads, tap their feet and sway their bodies in time to music.
View a video of foot-tapping, head-bobbing dancing birds.
Humans are now no longer considered the world's only dancers. Scientists suspect dogs, cats and non-human primates can't truly dance, but dolphins, elephants, walruses and seals might be able to groove.
Some birds even appear to have more dancing talent than others. The disco king of both studies, published in Current Biology is Snowball, a sulfur-crested cockatoo.
"You can see him dancing to 'Another One Bites the Dust' and other songs on YouTube," Aniruddh Patel, lead author of one of the papers, told Discovery News.
Related Content:
"He seems to prefer rock music with a steady beat," added Patel, a researcher at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif. Patel used one of Snowball's favorite songs, "Everybody" by the Backstreet Boys, for his team's study.
While Snowball danced away to different beats manipulated by the scientists, they coded his movements from video and discovered the cockatoo synchronized his head-banging, body swaying and foot tapping to musical rhythms far more often than mere chance would predict. Occasionally the bird would get out of step, which the scientists liken to kids attempting to match their movements to beats.
"It would be interesting to quantitatively compare Snowball's pattern of in-and-out of sync to children's dancing to music, to see what human age his dancing most closely resembles," said Patel, who hopes people won't run out to buy a parrot for evening entertainment. The birds, he said, "need a great deal of interaction and attention from humans to stay happy."
For the second study, Adena Schachner and her team studied a dancing African grey parrot, along with Snowball. They too concluded that birds really do dance.
"With regard to the different types of movement, we thought it was incredibly interesting that Snowball had the capacity to move multiple body parts to a beat -- not just his head, but also his feet," said Schachner, a researcher in psychology at Harvard University. "This type of flexibility makes the birds' dancing seem a lot like human dance."
Schachner and her colleagues next studied thousands of YouTube videos showing animals dancing. The researchers checked to see which species had rhythm and could align their movements to musical beats. They identified 14 parrot species and an Asian elephant that appear to have this ability.
The common thread among all dancers, humans included, seems to be vocal mimicry, with dancing perhaps being a by-product of that skill. Elephants would appear to be the oddball in the group, but they've been known to copy noises, like the sound of moving trucks, similar to how parrots can repeat what they hear.
"It may be that after that (vocal) machinery was in place, further selection and other cognitive machinery was needed too" for dancing, said Schachner. Additional studies are needed, however, to confirm the theory.
As for Snowball, he continues to surprise owner Irena Schulz, the founder and president of Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service, Inc. For instance, someone recently sent her a CD of German polka tunes.
"We fell over when we saw him dancing to those!" Schulz exclaimed. "We never knew German polka tunes would inspire head-banging from a cockatoo!"
Related Links:
our sites
video
mobile
shop
stay connected
corporate
