ArticleScientific reports2018
Habitual tool use innovated by free-living New Zealand kea.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The flexible, the stereotyped and the in-between: putting together the combinatory tool use origins hypothesis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Social learning and culture in birds: emerging patterns and relevance to conservation.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Evidence of self-care tooling and phylogenetic modeling reveal parrot tool use is not rare.iScience · 2025Article
- Mechanical problem solving by plush-crested jays: are tools special after all?Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Do kea parrots infer the weight of objects from their movement in a breeze?Biology letters · 2024Article
- Kea, bird of versatility. Kea parrots (Journal of ornithology · 2024Article
- Individual preferences for sound tool design in a parrot.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Coupling of coastal activity with tidal cycles is stronger in tool-using capuchins (Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Implications of wild cockatoos manufacturing and using tools.Learning & behavior · 2022Article
- Extending the Reach of Tooling Theory: A Neurocognitive and Phylogenetic Perspective.Topics in cognitive science · 2021Article
- Innovative problem solving in macaws.Learning & behavior · 2021Article
- How to Report Anecdotal Observations? A New Approach Based on a Lesson From "Puffin Tool Use".Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Self-control in crows, parrots and nonhuman primates.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2019Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The emergence of flexible tool use is rare in the animal kingdom and thought to be largely constrained by either cognitive ability or ecological factors. That mostly birds with a high level of intelligence innovate tool use in captivity is consistent with the former hypothesis. We report here the first documented case of habitual tool use innovated in the wild by a bird species only known to have used tools in captivity. Trap-boxes containing food-bait and snap-trap(s) were installed in the remote Murchison Mountains, New Zealand, from 2002 to catch introduced stoats. Kea tampered with the trap-boxes in various ways. Over approximately 2.5 years, sticks were found inserted into at least 227 different trap-boxes that were up to 27 km apart. Video footage confirmed that the stick insertion was kea tool use. Trap-boxes are unlikely to have provided the only possibility for kea tool use in their habitat given their extractive foraging and skilled object manipulation. We argue that they instead greatly facilitated the opportunity for tool use, thus increasing the chance that kea would invent the behaviour. The innovation of tool use by kea in response to facilitation provides rare field support for the cognitive constraints hypothesis.
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