Video: Snowball the dancing parrot

Video: Snowball the dancing parrot

1 May, 2009 | 3.18PM

• Written by: Kirsty Kane
• Filed under: Videos: dancing, technology

Here’s some Friday afternoon fun: there’s a story circulating the web at the moment featuring footage of this cool parrot called Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, who is able to dance in near perfect rhythm to music.

As you can see in this video, he’s able to bob his head and tap his feet in time to Stevie Nicks’ ‘Edge of Seventeen’ (he also has a mean routine for Backstreet Boys). Previously it was thought that only humans had the ability to groove. Now researchers have begun testing parrots’ ability to dance and they’ve discovered something quite remarkable.

Dr Adena Schachner, from Harvard University, spoke to the BBC after tests with Snowball and another bird called Alex.

Dr Schachner said: “We brought some novel music that we knew Alex had never heard before - so there was no way he had been trained to dance to this music.

“We set up the camera and hit play, and we were shocked to see that Alex started dancing to the beat. He started to bob his head up and down.”

In another test, the scientists pitch shifted tracks up and down changing their BPM rate, and the parrots still managed to keep time with the music.

Quote
The scientists believe that the parrots’ apparent capacity for dance may be linked to another talent that they share with humans - the ability for vocal learning and vocal imitation.

They believe the part of the brain that evolved to allow us and a handful of other species, including dolphins, songbirds, elephants and some cetaceans, to learn and mimic different sounds may also be responsible for the ability to move in time to music.

So they went onto YouTube and studied thousands of videos of dancing animals and discovered that all the animals that could keep a beat were ‘vocal learners’.

The scientists believe further research will also provide an insight into how our relationship with music evolved.

Related

Christen Reutens awhile back did a post called ‘Are we all born to dance?’ that featured a video of a baby dancing like a proper raver.

Full story here: BBC News

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