Dear Parrots magazine,
Feathered primates?
I refer to the article in Parrots issue 289 entitled ‘Parrots ‘giving to’ parrots’. This article refers to a scientific paper published in the journal Current Biology, the findings of which are really important because they reveal that individual parrots will voluntarily help each other.
Whilst I am very pleased that Parrots magazine has brought these findings to the attention of its readers, I wish to emphasise that these experiments did not take place in a vacuum. The research was conducted at the Max-Planck Comparative Cognition Research Station in Loro Parque in Tenerife, under the agreement between the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology and the Loro Parque Fundación. The article also refers to parrots as ‘feathered primates’, but as more revelations about the intelligence of parrots are without doubt in the pipeline, perhaps it won’t be too long before we refer to primates as ‘hairy parrots’!
David Waugh, LPF Correspondent