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Design and evaluation of a parrot-to-parrot video-calling system (2023)
113 michalpleban 46 5/6/2025, 11:03:28 AM smithsonianmag.com ↗
I have noticed some new behaviours recently:
1. If I'm eating the bird will beg me for food. I have been able to get him to try any foods that he sees me eating.
2. My bird has a high demand for proteins, which he gets somewhat in nuts (limited due to fats) and he will steal meat whenever possible. The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.
3. He now makes a wider variety of noises, far beyond any video I have seen of his species. I believe he is trying to replicate human speech and gets close in tone. We talk to him regularly and I think he tries to talk back.
Anybody else experience strange behaviours with their birds?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superb_parrot
Oh and my 12yo bourk's parakeet really like chicken and madly love poutine. Its so funny seeing her taking a bite of French fries followed by a bite of cheese.
Are you worried if you give him excessive screen time he won't be able to focus on his studies or something? ;-)
(Cute story, thanks for sharing.)
The other concern is that when he gets too much screen time he becomes less interested in us and starts to be a little aggressive (lands on you and pecks you until you put bird videos on) whenever anybody gets a phone out.
[0] https://youtu.be/T8C8iJm_2gc
https://nautil.us/the-great-silence-237510/
Corvids, parrots are extremely intelligent. How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.
If you can do grab a copy of Alex and Me.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3018307-alex-me
Reminds me of what some people who worked at a facility that took in parrots and similar animals whose owners couldn’t care for them.
They described the birds as little kids, except they can fly and have powerful beaks. Some of them have very strong "destructive" urges too / they want to take everything apart and so on.
Far too many people acquire animals that they aren't able or willing to take proper care of, and parrots have very long lives.
They also get to know the birds in a very personal way it seemed. One bird was "upset" with one of the handlers so she didn't want to participate when we met the birds that day. Apparently that handler had broken up a fight between upset bird and another that morning. Upset bird took that personally.
At the same time upset bird didn't want to miss out on meeting everyone so she came along with two other birds who met us.... upset bird just sorts of sat on the periphery and made sure that everyone knew she wasn't participating. She wanted folks to know she was there, but was not going to perform.
> They also seemed to understand that another live bird was on the other side of the screen, not a recorded bird
And I really hate to bring AI into it, but "bird chat bot" doesn't seem too hard to train on a bunch of behaviors for live interaction. It could offer a palette of avatars.
So to scale, hmm. Visual sentiment analysis of parrots. Parrot-accessibility. And... some kind of chaperone role... Is there a name for UX design which prioritizes non-negativity of experience over task completion and not leaving? Note that parrot-centered design may have unfamiliar properties, like say, stronger association with the physical location of the device, which might then require a second device elsewhere to emulate a hypothetical "I'm avoiding you and going away to hang with friends" flock UX.
Not sure if they were conveying any information to each other, but they seemed to enjoy it.
“I’m over here!”
...Found it: https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/springtime
https://kottke.org/11/10/richard-stallmans-rider
Bird Roulette
BeakBook
CagedIn
Instasquawk
And ……….. Twitter
--
There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part of that realm:
> The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior - at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls
Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions are interpolated by an assistant.
Despite some crazy wider definitions I ran into, social media traditionally meant things similar to Facebook, so real names, over-sharing of your life, falsehood, data collection, and what that leads to.
Anything good that might happen on social networks, is a result of a large portion of the population (disgracefully) being on them.
Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-toxic because of all the levers also required to make it profitable via engagement.
It's very hard to distinguish social media from the algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-example, but we're now in a place where the audience demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.
Parents have written of setting up a local minecraft server for kids, and their friends, a neighborhood, or a school. Is setting up a local social media server also a thing?