A parrot in New Zealand steals a GoPro and films its escape

It’s no secret that the inconspicuous New Zealand Kea (Nestor notabilis) is a clever but deceptive bird: it has been known to mess with sheep, move traffic cones and steal purses.

One of these thieves stole a GoPro camera from a family hiking the Kepler Trail in Fiordland National Park in New Zealand’s South Island. The family had paused the camera at the parapet of their vacation home to film keas. But one terrible bird ran straight for the camera, caught it and took it for a ride over the mountainous landscape.

Animal manager and photographer

Gobro filmed the adventure from the air, and the animal director and photographer produced impressive aerial shots of the alpine region. The camera also captured the parrot as it landed, resulting in a close-up of the bird’s face and filming it chewing on bits of plastic.

Meanwhile, the family followed the parrot to the ground and was able to recover the camera in time before the bird did more damage. “We just followed the squeak,” Alex Verhol told New Zealand’s Seven Sharp. “My son decided to look at some of the rocks that looked like a good place for a bird to land.” In fact, the Kia was just sitting there with the camera still filming.

Work is not uncommon for birds

This procedure is not uncommon for birds, which are said to be exceptionally intelligent. How smart is Keas, researchers now have various studies can prove. For example, New Zealand scientists have found that birds take probability into account when making decisions. The intelligent mountain parrot is also one of the few animals that can combine different types of information to make judgments. In the animal kingdom, a high level of intelligence has so far been found only in great apes.

During the experiments, the researchers showed the bag two jars with black and orange symbols. The birds were taught that black tokens could be exchanged for a food reward. In the experiment, Keas then had to choose the jar they thought would give them the best chance of getting a reward.

Experiments on keas show their intelligence

Although the researchers changed the number of black and orange tokens in both jars, keas always chose to be more likely to grab a black token. Also, a second experiment, placing a baffle in the middle of jars with different proportions of black and orange symbols at the top and bottom, showed that the birds chose the jar with more black symbols above the barrier. In the final experiment, keas had to choose between two researchers who selected the tokens. One basically only took black tokens, even if there were fewer of them in the jar, while the other chose both colors. Once again, the birds remembered which of the researchers always caught a black token.

In the past year, the story of kea’s use of personal hygiene items became known. The parrot, which the researchers named Bruce, lives in the Willowbank Wildlife Refuge in Christchurch. The kea was found in the wild when it was a young bird in 2013, badly injured – the entire upper half of its beak is missing. Researchers studying the bird’s behavior found that Bruce overcame his disability by finding pebbles to take care of himself. Feather cleaning is important for birds to remove dust, dirt and parasite particles.

Bird life has been hit hard in New Zealand

An estimated 3,000 to 7,000 kilos still live in the wild in New Zealand. Parrots have a bad reputation, especially among farmers, because they continue to attack sheep and tear large pieces of meat from their backs with their powerful beaks. Between the 1860s and the 1870s, the New Zealand government encouraged farmers to hunt birds and paid bounties for dead kiwis. About 150,000 were shot for it. The bird was not officially protected until 1986.

Basically, the bird life of New Zealand is badly damaged: in addition to the intelligent kea, there are also kiwis and flightless kakapo. Like the kea, their numbers have been severely depleted since humans settled in New Zealand about 700 years ago. 70 bird species have become extinct over the centuries, 30 percent of those still alive are now threatened. According to a study published in August 2019 in the journal “current biology‘published, it will take 50 million years for New Zealand’s bird life to fully regenerate.