Would you see a ballet featuring all parrots? This bare-eyed cockatoo, named Jerry, makes a good case for a parrot version of “Swan Lake.?(Parrot Lake anyone?) Watch Jerry dance away to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Little Swans.?lt;/span>
Probably the most famous dancing ?oo is Snowball, a medium sulphur-crested Eleanora cockatoo. Aniruddh Patel, Ph.D, Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, studied Snowball for a study to see if animals were capable of synchronized rhythmic movement. According to the BirdChannel article “Research With Snowball,” “Patel had written a theoretical paper proposing that the ‘ability to move to a beat grew out of the ability to imitate sounds.'”
So what is dancing in comparison to parrots? According to the late parrot behavior consultant, Liz Wilson, in her article “Dancing:?lt;/span>
Human label for the animated bobbing and strutting that many parrots do, often in response to music and especially raucous rock ??roll. Not to be confused with the highly repetitious “stereotypical behaviors?(seen especially in cockatoos), where the bird repeats the same motions over and over for long periods, rather like a tiger pacing back and forth in its cage for hours.
So what do you do? “Enjoy and join in the fun!?Wilson said.