葵花鹦鹉会自己开垃圾桶找吃的？

When you think of Australia, it's hard to not immediately think of its eclectic animals.

提到澳大利亚，立马就会想到它多种多样的动物。

You know the ones: jacked kangaroos, tarantulas, the inland taipan.

你知道的，有：站立的袋鼠，狼蛛，内陆太攀蛇。

But one bird that deserves more attention is the cockatoo.

而引人注意的鸟类则是葵花鹦鹉。

"They're quite raucous...They're flamboyant. There's nothing quiet about them," Richard Major, a bird ecologist, says.

“它们很吵闹...长得很艳丽。一刻也安静不下来，”理查德·梅洁尔说道，

"They're really in your face and they're just full of life and mischief."

“它们随处可见，充满活力，喜欢捣蛋。”

Major has been studying Australian birds for almost 40 years.

梅杰尔研究澳大利亚的鸟类已经有快四十年了。

A few years back, he began noticing something peculiar in Sydney: cockatoos that were eating out of someone's open trash bin.

几年前，他开始在悉尼注意到一件奇特的事情：葵花鹦鹉会在有些人敞开的垃圾桶里找东西吃。

"I wasn't really expecting cockatoos to be rubbish bin feeders," he said.

“我之前都没想到葵花鹦鹉会去吃垃圾，”他说。

"They're not something like ibis or crows that are scavengers. These are good, self-respecting seed-eaters — or at least plant-eaters."

“它们不像那种朱鹭或者乌鸦这种食腐动物。葵花鹦鹉是很好的，有尊严的吃种子的鸟——或者至少是植食性的。”

Major was a bit taken aback by the meal choice, but brushed the encounter off.

梅杰尔对它们的食物选择有点吃惊，不过并未太过理会。

Then, he saw something even stranger.

可是后来，他看到了更奇怪的事情。

"The thing that really got me was when I saw a cockatoo fly up from a rubbish bin, sit on a electricity wire, holding a chicken drumstick in its foot," he says, explaining that a cockatoo can perch on one leg and hold its food in another.

“真正吸引我的是当我看到一只葵花鹦鹉从垃圾桶里飞出来，站在电线上，用爪子抓着一只鸡腿来吃，”他说，同时解释说葵花鹦鹉是可以单脚站立然后用另一只脚抓取食物的。

"Here it was, just munching on a drumstick, and I thought, 'Oh god, this is verging on cannibalism.' Certainly once cockatoos start eating meat, we're done for."

“当时它正在咀嚼一只鸡腿，我想，'天哪，这简直是同类相食。’当然，一旦凤头鹦鹉开始吃肉，我们就完了。”

He'd just assumed that those bins were already open and overflowing — nothing clever about that.

他当时以为这些垃圾桶是敞开的，垃圾洒出来了——所以找到东西吃算不上聪明。

But Major later began observing several of the birds actually opening the bins themselves, and now he was intrigued.

但梅杰尔后来开始观察到有几只鸟实际上是自己打开了垃圾桶，所以他现在感到很神奇。

If this behavior spreads, he thought, "There'll be cockatoos opening bins all over the place and they'll have this endless supply of rubbish."

如果这种行为变得普遍的话，他想，“那么到处都会有葵花鹦鹉去打开垃圾桶了，它们就会拥有数不尽的垃圾可以吃。”

A cockatoo smorgasbord.

垃圾就成了葵花鹦鹉的自助餐了。

Curious to explore this, Major sent a video to some colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior.

出于好奇，梅杰将一段视频发给了马克斯·普朗克动物行为研究所的一些同事。

He wasn't sure if they'd be as into it as he was, but to his joy, the scientists were amazed.

他不确定他们是否会像他一样对它感兴趣，但令他高兴的是，科学家们都惊呆了。

"The amazing thing is just that they really found a way to access another resource," Barbara Klump, a behavioral ecologist at the institute, says.

“令人惊讶的是，它们真的找到了获取另一种食物资源的方法，”该研究所的行为生态学家芭芭拉·克朗普说

Cockatoos typically live in woodland environments and eat a variety of seeds, nuts and fruits.

葵花鹦鹉一般是居住在林木环境中，吃的是各种种子，坚果和水果。

In the last few decades, Major says their populations in urban environments have increased.

梅杰尔说在最近几十年里，它们在城市中的种群数量增加了。

Klump stresses that, even though urban cockatoos have access to a lot of resources and a greater variety of food options, they're not all freely available, which is what makes this behavior what she calls "an innovation."

克朗普强调，尽管都市凤头鹦鹉有很多资源和更丰富的食物选择，但它们并非都是免费获得的，这就是她所说的“创新”行为。

The cockatoos make it look easy, but as someone who has studied animal behavior for years, Klump could see that it was actually a really complex motor action.

凤头鹦鹉也许让这种行为看起来很容易，但作为一个研究动物行为多年的人，克朗普可以看到，这实际上是一个非常复杂的有动机的行为。

First, they pry the bin open, hold the lid with their beaks, walk along the rim, and then flip it over — and she noticed subtle differences in each of these stages between different birds.

首先，它们得把垃圾桶盖打开，用嘴叼着盖子，沿着桶边走几步，然后把盖子掀开——她还注意到不同的鸟在做这几步的时候会有区别。

Klump's interest was piqued.

这激起了克朗普的兴趣。

"It opens up lots of questions," she says, "of 'How do they actually acquire this skill to follow this sequence?' and 'What are the differences, maybe, between individuals or also between different areas where the birds opened up in?"

她说，“这让我想到了很多问题，比如，它们如何获得这些操作步骤的技能的？不同个体之间的区别在哪里又或者不同地区的鹦鹉做法有什么不同？”

A team of scientists — including John Martin, Sonja Wild, Jana K. Hörsch and Lucy Aplin — joined Klump and Major to figure out what was going on with these clever cockatoos.

包括约翰·马丁、索尼娅·怀尔德、嘉娜·凯·霍克和露西·阿普林在内的一组科学家与克朗普和梅杰一起，开始研究这些聪明的凤头鹦鹉到底怎么做到的。

They started by sending surveys out to different suburbs in Sydney to ask people if they had noticed the big white parrots opening up their trash bins and, if they had, when they first saw it.

他们首先向悉尼不同的郊区发送问卷调查，询问人们是否注意到大的白色鹦鹉打开了他们的垃圾桶，以及如果打开了，他们第一次看到这种行为是什么时候。

The survey results showed that over two years, the number of trash-raiding cockatoo sightings had increased from just three suburbs to 44, indicating that the birds were learning from each other.

调查结果显示两年多以来，吃垃圾的凤头鹦鹉的郊区的数量从3个增加到了44个，表明这些鸟儿在相互学习。

A culture of trash can break-ins was radiating out from the birds who first figured it out.

这种翻找垃圾的文化从第一只学会的葵花鹦鹉那里传播了开去。

For the next part of their study, the team wanted to get a closer look at the birds themselves.

研究的下一步，这支团队打算更仔细地看看这种鸟本身。

Normally, this kind of behavioral analysis involves capturing the animals, but Klump had a different way.

通常，这种动物行为研究需要去抓捕动物，但克朗普用来一种不同的办法。

She spent weeks going to parks around Sydney and feeding seeds to the birds to get them close, then marking hundreds of them with non-toxic paint so they could be easily identified later when the team took videos.

她花了几个星期的时间去悉尼周围的公园，给这些鸟喂食种子，让它们接近，然后用无毒的油漆给数百只鸟做标记，这样团队拍摄视频时就能很容易地认出它们。

By studying these videos and tracking the birds, they found that cockatoos in different regions had their own ways of opening the lids.

通过研究这些视频和追踪鹦鹉，他们发现不同地区的葵花鹦鹉打开垃圾盖的方式不同。

The differences were small — opening the bins with their feet versus their beaks, opening the left side or the right, walking the lid back via shuffled feet or one foot in front of the other — but consistent.

区别不大——开盖有的用脚，有的用嘴，有的开左边，有的开右边，沿着桶边走的时候有点是交叉步，有的前后步——但确实存在。

Major says this is a demonstration that the birds are learning from each other, creating their own subcultures.

梅杰尔说这就表明这些鸟类在相互学习，同时也创造出自己的亚文化。

"[This] may sound trivial, but when you put these together, it is a different way of opening a bin that demonstrates that is a different behavior," he says.

“(这)听起来可能微不足道，但当你把这些放在一起来看时，这是一种不同的打开垃圾桶的方式，表明这是一种不同的行为，”他说。

"And it's a different culture because birds that are in the same social group have a similar behavioral method of opening a bin, whereas birds that are further apart are more different in their opening style."

“这是一种不同的文化，因为在同一个社会群体中的鸟类有相似的打开垃圾桶的行为方法，而离得更远的鸟类在打开垃圾桶的方式上区别会更大。”