Saturday, February 7, 2009
Did You Know That...
Aniruddh Patel, a senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in California, received a link to Snowball, the dancing cockatoo, on youtube.com from a friend. He decided to test if the cockatoo was really dancing. He got in touch with Snowball's owner, Irena Shulz, asking if she would help him study the bird's rhythm or lack thereof.
Patel send her CDs of the bird's favourite Backstreet Boys track at different tempos and had her videotape his routines. He then graphed Snowball's movements against the varying beats. Patel discovered that the frequent moments that Snowball locked onto the beat weren't by chance. They demonstrated sensitivity to rhythm and an ability to synchronize to it.
Snowball and I seem to share a love of Stevie Nicks so I have included a tape of Snowball practicing her backup dancing routine for her next road trip with Stevie.
If you notice Snowball dances using his/her left foot as the lead. Unlike people who are mostly right-handed, parrots are mostly left-footed.
K: We look forward to Sophie's debut!
Posted by
Pippa
Labels:
dancing parrots,
left-footed parrots
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2 comments:
You're so cute. Sophie's dancing now, so excited when I told her she made the 'news.' You know I watch these things.
A friend was telling me why she doesn't like birds (story from her history of, of course, bad owner mistake that bird got blamed for). She's a musician so I told her she's love Sophie if she heard her sing "Waltzing Matilda" and "Evita."
Send me a video and I shall be proud to be the first person to showcase Sophie and her talent to the world. I'm not kidding.
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