BB is a very mechanically-minded cockatoo, so he gets lots of opportunities to work with screws, bolts, other types of attachments. I also think that he likes certain things to play with specifically because they are noisy. One of the things he has consistently enjoyed is tossing a yellow plastic chain around on top of the aluminum baking pan inside his cage. Many of his toys come from hardware stores, including that chain. Peach likes the yellow plastic chains also, but she chews them into a pile of broken links and plastic bits, while BB leaves the whole chain intact.
A few days ago he left the chain directly underneath the perch where he sleeps, so it was desperately in need of cleaning. While it was drying I wanted to give him a different but similar experience, so I gave him a piece of stainless steel chain. (This chain was purchased specifically for my cockatoos. The metal is safe, and the links are welded without a gap, so there’s no danger of heavy metal poisoning and very little danger of injury.) I put the chain on top of the big play tray on the floor and watched him play with it a little.
I was working on something unrelated for a few minutes and continued hearing the metal against metal sounds so I knew where he was and what he was doing. But when I checked on him, I saw that he had pulled one of his plastic baby links over to where the chain was, and he was pulling links of the steel chain onto the plastic link. I have often been impressed by his ability to manipulate objects, but this was particularly impressive.
I watched him for quite a while doing this, as he pushed the steel links on and off of the plastic link. I think he does it entirely by feeling the objects with his beak and tongue since it’s too close for him to see clearly. It’s obvious that he understands where the gap in the plastic link is. This occupied his attention for at least a half hour. The photograph shows what it looked like when he was done, with three of the steel chain’s links looped onto the plastic link. I’m pretty sure that at one point he had even more of the links attached, but he kept playing with it and changing it.
