AJ, The Basketball-Playing Bird : Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

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GrrlScientist is an evolutionary biologist, ornithologist, aviculturist, birder and freelance science and nature writer. A native of the Pacific Northwest, she relocated from Seattle to NYC with her parrots after earning a BS in Microbiology (emphasis in Virology) and PhD in Zoology (Ornithology) from the University of Washington. In NYC, she was the Chapman Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History for two years, pursuing part of her "dream" research project by reconstructing a molecular phylogeny of the parrots of the South Pacific islands. GrrlScientist and her five parrots are currently relocating to Germany, where she will continue writing her blog while also writing a book and learning German. (Meanwhile, her parrots will continue to nibble on her extensive personal library.) If you appreciate GrrlScientist's writing, you can help pay her living expenses by hiring her to "blog" your conference, speak at your club or write articles for your publication (or by clicking on the Paypal button below). If you read an essay on this blog that you especially enjoyed, please nominate it for inclusion in OpenLab2009.

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AJ, The Basketball-Playing Bird

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Posted on: April 14, 2007 2:35 PM, by "GrrlScientist"

I have been teaching my parrots a few tricks, but I haven't attempted anything like this (yet). I am not entirely sure how to train them to play basketball or golf, although the other behaviors are something I can train them to do.

tags: AJ, parrot, birds

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Comments

Very funny. Now I want a bird.

Posted by: biosparite | April 14, 2007 3:39 PM

Very impressive! It always amazes me to see what you can train animals to do. I still remember watching the video of birds playing ping-pong in my high school psych class. Very cool!

Posted by: Library Diva | April 14, 2007 8:41 PM

Amazing.

Cockatoos are common here in Oz. An aunt has one older than me...and arguably wiser.

Posted by: DrDork | April 15, 2007 12:49 AM

At the start, was it auditioning for a Monty Python sketch?

Bob

Posted by: Bob O'H | April 15, 2007 1:38 AM

What I was noticing was how lovely his feathers are. That bird looks so healthy, so clearly he likes what he is doing.

Posted by: Tabor | April 15, 2007 9:04 AM

Adorable! Now I wanna teach Pepper how to play dead. :)

Posted by: Shelley | April 16, 2007 4:57 PM

It always dismays me to see humans teaching parrots to do human actvities-is this too harsh?

Posted by: LARRY ZIEGLER | June 21, 2007 12:21 PM

My experience with all sorts of parrots is that they are happy enough to play along with the strange things their humans may want, and doing so is more fun for them than not. If they are left on their own, they get bored, irritable and unhappy; they are intensely social, curious, intelligent and playful birds when they get a chance to be, and respond well to any sort of "game". They don't like doing the same thing over and over and over, if they have any choice, but they don't seem to mind learning.

I'd feel a lot worse for the poor bird, Larry, if it were just stuck in a cage with no-one to interact with.

Posted by: Luna_the_cat | June 21, 2007 1:02 PM

i might have agreed with you long long ago, larry, before i lived with parrots.

but as you might know, i have lived with parrots for most of my life. i have found that, as luna says, parrots love to play games. parrots are brilliant and inventive and they want to relate to (and manipulate -- in a good way) their environment because they crave social interaction. my parrots are always inventing games to play with me (i think of these games as my parrots' scientific experiments), and i try to accomodate them because i enjoy it, they enjoy it, and it gives them a sense of having some control over their world.

besides that, to train a parrot to do amazing things, such as larry the ringnecked parrot, it requires a close relationship exist between the person and the parrot. birds are difficult to train through fear: they "perform" because it is intellectually and emotionally satisfying to them.

Posted by: "GrrlScientist" | June 21, 2007 1:19 PM

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