'Bin chickens' learned to wash poisonous cane toads

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-63699884

by clouddrover • 4 years ago

162 94 4 years ago

Nursie3• 4 years ago

I think the article considerably overstates Australian ‘hatred’ of ibis.

Yes they are referred to as bin chickens by a lot of city people, and you do see them raiding bins, but for the most part it’s a bit of a joke and done affectionately. Saying they are reviled is a bit strong! Particularly in a country with monstrosities like the funnelweb and mouse spiders…

Great if they turn out to be a natural control on cane toads!

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

In the US, we have "trash pandas."

These are Raccoons. Clever little bastards. They can get into just about anything.

Raccoons also like to wash their food.

bobthepanda• 4 years ago

There was a viral video of a raccoon being sad because it tried to wash cotton candy, but being spun sugar it just dissolved in water.

mrmincent• 4 years ago

Yeah as an Aussie I don’t think the bin chickens are reviled at all. It’s more like we don’t necessarily agree with the way that they live their life, but we respect them for living life on their own terms.

wizofaus• 4 years ago

An affectionate tribute to said bird for those who haven't already seen it... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4dYWhkSbTU

combyn8tor• 4 years ago

There is a bit of a grassroots movement to make the bin chicken the mascot for the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane.

doctor_eval• 4 years ago

Thanks for posting this. I’m Australian and I have never heard of Ibis being reviled and I thought I’d missed something. I mean isn’t there even a hotel chain called Ibis? (I seem to recall being stuck in the elevator with my then-ex girlfriend one night…)

The article really doubled down on the “reviled” nature of the birds that I figured they must know something. Do they really steal food from our of peoples hands? I’ve had a miner do that but the Ibis near me seem to stay away from people.

But then again, this is the BBC. I don’t know if there exists a worse news organisation that regards itself more highly.

gtvwill• 4 years ago

Mate most of us don't hate bin chickens at all. Tbh love em. Icon of the cities especially Sydney's inner west. Folks graf murals of them and all kinda representations :)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w4dYWhkSbTU

yesenadam• 4 years ago

Yeah, sydney inner west here, we get one landing in the backyard sometimes and having a gentle poke around. I like them. They have a kind of humble dignity.

yen223• 4 years ago

I love bin chickens. They are good birds.

Cockatoos, on the other hand, can fuck the fuck right off

zizee2• 4 years ago

Haha, I just posted the same comment. It's always entertaining to see one doing a snatch and grab from a public bbq, and then watch them leg it with a whole sausage in their beak...

jon_adler2• 4 years ago

I’m not sure. I dislike the Ibis quite a lot, and so does this guy (funny, NSFW): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO-OpFjHRbE

Nursie3• 4 years ago

That's hilarious, not seen that one before :)

mcbain2• 4 years ago

We've even got children's propaganda for these birds!: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/1743830041

vagrantJin3• 4 years ago

Well. Ibis is an elegant looking bird that looks out of place. Mynas look like crap so we kinda accept that they are city birbs.

kennend3• 4 years ago

Here (Canada) we have "cobra chickens".

what better way to explain it then having someone from OZ do it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvkkDRiLYkI

Ever see a bird chase away a Tiger??

hapidjus• 4 years ago

The ‘how’ was never explained right?

Edit: the title used to say “How ‘Bin chickens’ learned…”

Nursie3• 4 years ago

Stress the toad so it expresses venom, wash in water or wipe on grass, repeat a few times to exhaust the venom sacks, then swallow whole.

Unlike the method that crows and eagles are known to use - flip over and eat from the underside.

dvh• 4 years ago

Grandma used to have a mixed breed dog that could catch wasp mid air, quickly spit it out, then very carefully kept biting it (maybe 50 times, very quickly and carefully) to disable the stinger, and then he would just eat the wasp.

112358132134552• 4 years ago

how they learnt? evolution, natural selection. I guess like crows who are very clever as well, they observe, try, memorize, ..

xwdv• 4 years ago

This kind of knowledge doesn’t spread genetically, so I imagine there must be some mechanism by which the technique is taught within the species so that the knowledge of bin chickens gets handed down from generation to generation.

dang• 4 years ago

We've re-unhow'd the title above. Thanks!

exolymph• 4 years ago

"They've got an incredible breeding capacity... so with every female cane toad that's removed from the environment, it's the prevention of up to 70,000 new cane toads each year," Ms Vincent says.

Wow. That's a lot of toads!

bell-cot2• 4 years ago

Big grain of salt: If cane toad populations actually grew at anything remotely close to 70,000X per generation...it would take less than 6 generation for the descendants of one male/female pair of cane toads to have a larger mass than the planet Earth.

jandrese• 4 years ago

This is the same calculation you can make about swatting a fly when you were a kid. In reality the population of the cane toad/fly is roughly what the environment will support. Killing individuals makes little to no difference.

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

This story brings me to ask the question if anyone has ever done some kind of IQ scale for birds where each species is rated by intelligence.

The reason I ask is that there seems to be a vast difference in intelligence between species. Some birds don't just seem dumb to us but are so in that their actions likely endanger the species—for example, birds that allow cuckoos to parasitize their nests with their eggs and actually go on raise the cuckoo's young which is obviously not its kin compared to birds that are clearly very smart such as ravens, ibis and currawongs.

I have currawongs in a tree near my house and one bird in particular clearly recognizes me from other people, moreover, it knows by my actions whether I'm likely to feed it or not quite some time before I actually do so (it seems to quickly take measure of my mood so to speak). It also knows when I'm annoyed with it, especially so when it rummages around in my overfull wheelie bin when the lid isn't properly shut—when caught in the act it flies off onto a branch and stares at me the moment I appear (even if I'm not close to the bin). At other times he hangs around so close to me I could just about reach out and grab him (he's wary of me but certainly not timid about getting close even when I have no food).

I may be wrong but I simply cannot image that a bird with the inate intelligence of this currawong would let itself be a surrogate for raising a cuckoo's young.

It seems to me this differential in intelligence between bird species is huge but I'd love to have an actual measure of it.

BTW, when currawongs are nesting it's not advisable to get too close to the tree or you'll likely be dive-bombed by them (they can be quite vicious).

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

I may be wrong but I simply cannot image that a bird with the inate intelligence of this currawong would let itself be a surrogate for raising a cuckoo's young.

I imagine birds raise cuckoos not because they think they are their offspring, but because of some instinctive imperative like we mammals have for raising any kind of puppy.

fire2• 4 years ago

if memory serves in many cases ( because there are a lot of parasite birds ) it's an evolutionary thing to prevent the parasite layer from destroying their own eggs - many of the parasite species will check on the nest after the fact and destroy it / the eggs if their eggs have been removed

7952• 4 years ago

Exactly. A bird isn't "raising young" in an abstract way. It has genes that produce certain behaviour. Build nest. Sit on egg. Roll egg out of nest if you get too hungry. Regurgitate food into squaking red mouth. Remove feces from nest. Taken together you get some level of success in reproduction.

And expecting a bird to be "intelligent" in this situation would imply a source of knowledge about what an egg is supposed to look like.

enneff2• 4 years ago

Why on earth are you feeding a currawong? They’re among the meanest most mercenary omnivores; they hardly need your help.

lostlogin2• 4 years ago

The pied variant looks 100% like the thing New Zealanders call a magpie.

Vicious and horrible.

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

First, one can't explain all fine details in a post or it'd be too long and wouldn't be read so I'll expand the post here.

It may surprise you but from my limited experience I agree with you that currawongs are about the meanest most mercenary omnivore I've seen. I suppose I've had a casual interest in them from early on, when as child of about five one attacked me whilst I was walking with my mother in a park. It dive-bombed me and its beak left my head bleeding.

I never feed them regularly but only when it suits me such as when I'm eating or have scraps immediately to hand and it's only when I've time. The reason is that the birds and one in particular will come very close to me where I can study their behavior in response to things I do such as moving around, staring at them and so on. From this it's clear to me that currawongs are significantly more intelligent than say pidgins or seagulls (having observed them in similar situations) and on a spectrum I'd put the ibis somewhere between them and currawongs but closer to the latter. It's their intelligence that holds my interest.

Feeding currawongs means that I can be within a meter or so of them for quite some minutes. What I found intriguing is how quickly they learn and remember and they do so for a long time. As I said, they know me and others in the neighborhood, they have no difficulty in distinguishing between people and they show this by responding very differently to each person they've become aware of. I can be away for weeks and sometimes several months can pass between my interactions with them yet they still specifically remember me from others.

Outside domesticated pets, they are essentially the only animal I've had regular interaction with that has sufficient cognition and intelligence to single me out from others and remember the fact. That alone makes them fascinating from an observational perspective (essentially it's curiosity that drives my interaction with them).

Note: I'm not an expert in animal behavior nor do I have anything other than a general interest in the subject (I've a technology-based background).

jamiek88• 4 years ago

It's not stupidity that leads birds to raise cuckoos eggs it's the fact that cuckoos are mobsters who check up after laying and if their egg/chick isn't still there they destroy the entire nest and clutch of eggs.

The other species live with the parasitism grudgingly not obliviously!

nullc2• 4 years ago

I thought that at least in some species the brood parasite evicts the other young from the nest-- in this case there would be no reason to not abandon it if it truly were detected.

prennert• 4 years ago

Maybe cuckoos do this to breed birds for their acceptance of cuckoos eggs, which might help birds learning to accept them.

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

OK, that makes sense whilst the clutch of eggs remain in the nest but once the cuckoo chick has ejected them there is no reason for the birds to continue nesting there.

As I said to nullc there has to be some other reason why, say, the Reed Warbler continues to feed a cuckoo chick twice its size with now no viable offspring of its own if it's not oblivious to the fact (see video in that post).

nullc2• 4 years ago

would let itself be a surrogate for raising a cuckoo's young.

I don't find it surprising at all. Imagine a mother from the earliest humans, not equipped with complex language, formal education, or a civilization-- gives birth. Somehow an infant chimp is slipped into her lap along with her own baby.

Both babies look weird, one is strangely hairless one is strangely harry. Both cling on and nurse. Seems obvious to me that mom is going to try to tend to both babies.

And a chimp isn't evolved to be a human brood parasite. If it were it would be more similar to humans in whatever ways mattered to the instincts and perceptions of the host (but not necessarily look very similar to a third party species).

So if you could at least imagine this working on a primitive human, then it's not at all surprising that it works on some birds.

In some sense you could see that capacity for raising a foreign young as itself a sign of intelligence: A highly unintelligent species would only raise its young in ways triggered by an extremely narrow and exact set of signals, while a more intelligent species may be more able to accommodate the differences and figure out how to make things work even when they're not quite right.

Think of all the scams modern humans fall for that can be warded off by "hey, watch out for scams that look like xyz". In both the birds case and the early pre-language human case, no one could have warned them that they might be exploited by impersonator babies.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 4 years ago

Not directly answering your question but related: Pepperberg and colleagues have done a fair amount of research into quantifying avian intelligence. There is a film called Life With Alex about her work with a Congo African Grey that is pretty interesting.

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

Noted, thanks.

YeGoblynQueenne• 4 years ago

Well, you got chickens and then you got corvids - and that's your avian intelligence scale, from 0 to 1.

Chickens are the dumbest animal on earth. They're dumber than fish. They're dumber than oysters. They're even dumber than people. They only survive because they breed so much and because we breed so many of them to eat them.

You are what you eat, we say. We eat so much chicken that we've become dumb like them and an animal that does something that a chicken would never do, on account of the animal not being terminally dumb as the chicken, strikes us as really clever. Hey, look at that clever bird, it learned to eat the toads. Yeah, duh. People used to come up with tricks like that all the time, back in the day, when they had to find their food in the wild. Nowadays the greatest challenge in securing sustenance is in finding which aisle the pasta was moved to every time the supermarket hires a new manager.

Intelligence is so overrated. What does it all lead to in the end? We've dominated our environment and now our environment sucks, and btw, it's also dying, with us in it. All those smarts that helped us eat wild animals and poisonous plants, they don't look that smart now, do they?

But maybe those birds, those "bin chickens", are really smart. They've learned to live in our world, even after we've covered up everything with concrete and cars. Maybe when we're gone they'll evolve into a better intelligent species than ours, make a better civilisation than ours. One that is not so smart that it can't avoid destroying itself.

hidroto• 4 years ago

i would put turkeys below chickens. the ones we had could not even find there way out of an open pen.

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

"They're even dumber than people. "

Years ago when thinking about this I used to envisage a graph with a log scale that would indicate the intelligence of brightest humans (the Einsteins of this world), the dumbest ones and also all other supposedly sentient animals extending way down to the simplest forms of life.

I pictured the graph with humans way out in front at the top but closely grouped together (that is there isn't that much difference between the dumbest and smartest human on an absolute scale). The next most intelligent animal on the scale would be widely separated from humans and a long way down the graph (despite the log scale).

In recent years, witnessing some of the things you mention and other antics I've seen, that gap has just about eroded altogether. Now, I no longer have any clear idea where humans should be placed on the graph (I still find it hard to believe how stupid humans can be—and I'm not being elitist about it as I include myself in that category).

Right, we need to reevaluate intelligence, IQ tests don't mean much in the grand schema. I suppose the thing that may distinguish us humans from other species is that at least some of us know how stupid we humans are.

BTW, I'd still group all humans pretty much together on an absolute scale (if it were ever possible to construct one), we're all pretty much the same.

PS: you're right about chickens, they're about as dumb as it gets when intelligence is measured in cognitive terms, but as you infer surviving with humans implies evolutionary intelligence (again what is intelligence?). Nevertheless, the difference in intelligence (in its cognitive sense) between chickens and covids and currawongs are miles apart—a comparison would almost be a non sequitur.

z2210558• 4 years ago

I’m sorry to have to let you know that the pied currawong is in fact parasitised by the channel billed cuckoo (the world’s biggest cuckoo in fact).

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

That's ingesting to know. What about the black currawong (they're the only species I've experience of)?

You may also wish to answer the question I've asked elsewhere, which is the cuckoo's inate behavior must also extend to the species it selects as surrogate hosts for its young (would it risk laying an egg in an eagle's nest at the risk of becoming food?).

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

...Much later.

I've since done a little research on this and now have a somewhat clearer understanding of brood parasites and I've learned that it's no simple matter. However, one thing is apparent and that's despite there being many quite logical theories about it there's no clear proof about why the parasites and those being parasitized act the way they do—see my comment to vagrantJin.

markdown• 4 years ago

There's an aussie youtuber called Mark (Self Sufficient Me) who has a dog that's addicted to cane toad venom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0x9_tATD9E

linuxandrew• 4 years ago

I've heard crows have also learnt to eat cane toads (crows are known to be quite smart) - https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2018...

Apparently other animals are eating them with varying success - https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-11-01/cane-toad-nat...

zizee2• 4 years ago

There are few Australian animals more reviled than the white ibis.

I just want to say that as a Queenslander who has had Ibises run off with whole steaks brazingly zoinked straight off a sizzling bbq, I think reviled is a bit hyperbolic. I have think people mostly have a grudging respect for these bbq bandits

soperj2• 4 years ago

Question: Why don't aussies have lids on their BBQs?

technion• 4 years ago

I do, but I've had snags taken by kookaburras just trying to move them onto a plate before taking them inside.

jon_adler2• 4 years ago

The ibises are usually located on the coast, by a beach where humans hang out. In Queensland, the council typically provide free BBQ facilities to cook your lunch. It’s often a great experience. The free BBQs are electric and on a timer, with a flat grill. I’m guessing this is the type of BBQ the hapless steak was stolen from.

peblos• 4 years ago

Yep. Ibis are generally dirty, walk awkwardly, even take flight and land pretty awkwardly so they’re easy to dislike

But they’re pretty chill dudes. Lots of others birds will try to shove them off somewhere else and they’ll either wander away off their own accord, or they’ll completely ignore the other birds (probably a mynah) and just keep eating. They never really fight, they just mosy along

Then you see this big lump of a bird try to find a comfy spot in a big tree which isn’t the most graceful sight so it’s kinda funny. And then out of nowhere (because they’re so quiet) they’ll remind you that love a good HONK. Sometimes they’ll even HONK, HONK, HONK, EEEEK

they’re alright

fncivivue7• 4 years ago

The most interesting thing about bin chickens to me is how they got their name.

They never used to bother Sydney very much until one bird, yes one, was brought into the city on a boat. It managed to get back to it's home land, the next year, hundreds of them migrated into the city and raided the abundant food available in the cities bins.

These aren't stupid birds, they're intelligent and communicate with their peers about food availability.

hilbert4215• 4 years ago

You're right about them being dirty. I've probably seen a clean one but I can't remember it, the overwhelming impression I have of them is that they are the dirtiest scruffiest birds that I know. I wonder how clean they are when living in a natural nonhuman environment.

One thing is certain, they're bold, smart, calculating and cunning (you've no doubt noticed how they'll steal food the split second you cease paying immediate attention to it).

Can't say I like them much but I admire their survival tactics.

enneff2• 4 years ago

Agree. I think they’re awesome birds and it is so cool they such an exotic looking bird should be considered a pest.

nojs• 4 years ago

Agree, I would say they’re on par with the magpie in terms of grudging respect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_magpie

mcbain2• 4 years ago

I love magpies. Clever birds, iconic look, and beautiful songs, but they are super aggressive territorial bastards for a month or so a year.

Yes, I've been violently harassed by them while waking and riding bicycles through "their" territory - many people disagree, but I still think they are great.

unixhero• 4 years ago

Fuck I miss Queensland, lived there for 4 years.

ghiculescu• 4 years ago

Me too. I’ve been away for 5 years. Too long, time to move back!

rippercushions• 4 years ago

For those not familiar with this majestic bird, David Attenborough presents Planet Earth: Bin Chicken.

https://youtu.be/w4dYWhkSbTU

ElCapitanMarkla• 4 years ago

We have just spent a week on the Gold Coast with the kids and they loved the bin chickens.

We come home with a stuffed toy bin chicken toy and book for our little niece which is the no. 1 toy at the mo.

Also Barry the Bin Chicken 2032 - https://barrythebinchicken.com.au/

taberiand• 4 years ago

That's a contender for best mascot since Fatso the Fatarse Wombat

jamiepenney• 4 years ago

My kids love the bin chicken stories and we aren't even aussies.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1• 4 years ago

One morning in a Canadian Rocky Mountain Park cookshack, a Whiskeyjack (aka. Canada/Gray Jay) swooped through and snatched a piece of bacon out of the frying pan. I repositioned myself to deprive the Whiskeyjack of a straight flight path and didn't suffer any more such depredations.

Much better manners than the bears.

On other trips they will even eat out of your hand (not permitted in parks, but you can't corrupt a Whiskeyjack or Raven - they already are).

aussiesnack• 4 years ago

I was eating at a picnic table in the Border Ranges National Park (NSW, Aus) when a kookaburra swooped down to snatch, on the wing, a slice of meat out of my wife's sandwich.

'Bin chickens' learned to wash poisonous cane toads

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