Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Animals constantly adapt to their environments, but keeping up with humanity's dramatic influence on the natural world poses unique challenges. While this unfortunately ends in disaster for many species, some populations are figuring out new ways to navigate urban spaces. Back in 2022, wildlife biologists confirmed that a community of wild, sulfur-crested cockatoos in Sydney, Australia had learned how to open the lids of curbside trash bins on garbage day in order to snack on locals' leftovers. But that's not all these birds can do.

A few curious cockatoos learned how to open residential waste bins in Australia, and now other birds have started copying them, with incidences of bin-looting spreading across eastern Australia in easily traceable waves. "If they had learned it individually, we would have seen this popping up randomly, but their method is really spreading from one suburb to the next," says Barbara Klump at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany. A few years ago, Richard Major at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney filmed one of several sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) lifting a bin lid, and he shared the video with Klump's colleague. Intrigued, the researchers asked suburbanites around Sydney and Wollongong to help them trace the phenomenon by reporting whether they saw, or didn't see, incidences of bin-looting in their neighbourhoods. When the team started the project in 2018, scientists had documented bin-opening by cockatoos in three suburbs.

A longheld theory that animals raised in captivity perform better in cognitive testing may need to be rethought. A new study organized by the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna found evidence that wild animals perform just as well at intelligence tests as their lab-raised counterparts. To test the theory, researchers compared two groups of Goffin's cockatoos, a species often found in the tropical jungles of Singapore, Indonesia, and Puerto Rico. The team compared a lab-raised'colony' of 11 cockatoos at their lab in Vienna to eight wild cockatoos recently taken into captivity at a field laboratory in Indonesia. The researchers compared the performance of both groups in a series of simple problem solving tests and found the wild cockatoos were just as clever as the lab-raised ones.

A species of cuckoo appears to have learned how to use its beak to mimic the teeth chattering of wild pig-like animals called peccaries in order to ward off predators. The ground cuckoo, found in forests in Central and South America, often follow herds of peccaries to feed on the insects disturbed as they walk through leaf litter. Scientists have spotted that the birds use their beaks to sound like the teeth clacks the peccaries make to scare away large predatory cats. Last week, scientists found that parrots can use sticks to create drumming music in a similar way to humans. Wild palm cockatoos were filmed using sticks and seed pods to create rhythmic sounds as part of a complex mating ritual which also includes screeching, head bobbing and blushing, according to researchers.