Random cockatoo/FAANG story: I had an all-hands meeting earlier this year at Netflix, with me remote in Sydney, and a cockatoo knocked on my glass office door wanting to be let in -- so I'm saying "stop it! stop it!" when I realized my mic was on, and I'd said that to the whole org as my new manager was speaking. I quickly explained to everyone that I wasn't criticizing the meeting, oh no, I was actually talking to a bird that was knocking on the door.
I then felt it best to post a video of the bird knocking so people didn't think I was crazy. They knock with their beak: tap tap tap. Gets annoying when they do it at 6am to wake you up.
Recently I have noticed cockatoos raiding the bins in Sydney, it's definitely a thing.
Wait, why does a cockatoo ask to enter your home? I'm in US so to me these birds are generally best left in cages, last time I visited the bird sanctuary, one of them started angrily chasing a lady around
I am reminded of something I first read on Schneier's blog [0]:
Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open—you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it’s actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can’t get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.”
That ranger's quote reminded me about a time I learned about the overlap in abilities between cats and raccoons.
When I was a child my family had a cat that preferred to spend most of the time outside. When we went on vacation, we would leave it inside and come home to an annoyed cat. We couldn't leave it outside, since the raccoons would steal all the food. My dad had an idea that since we had a house on a hill with a wrap around balcony we could find a way to enable the cat to reach the balcony but not the raccoons.
First we tried putting a long narrow board between the ground and the balcony on the theory that cats have better balance than raccoons. False, raccoons are fine at climbing across a narrow bridge.
Then we decided that cats are smaller than raccoons, so we would make a gate with a cutout matching the exact dimensions of our cat's head and body. In some ways this worked, the adult raccoons could not access the food. Unfortunately raccoons are not stupid, they sent a child raccoon to fetch the food to the door and then scooped it through the small opening.
Having dealt with an owner away on vacation indoor/outdoor cat and racoon situation, I found the optimal way to handle it. It was a rental, so I couldn't install a microchip cat door.
1. Get feeders that run on a timer and release a fixed amount of food.
2. Duct tape the feeders very securely to a metal box. Put something very heavy in the box to keep the raccoons from flipping the box over.
3. Set the timers so they release enough food for the cat. Have them set to go off a few hours after sunrise. Raccoons hate going out during the day.
4. The cat eats all the food and when the raccoons come at night there is nothing for them.
5. Point a motion activated camera at the feeders so you can fix and make improvements to the duct taping to respond to those clever raccoons and to make sure the cat has enough to eat.
Correct. A lot of people freak out when the do see one out during the day because for some reason it is widely believed that they only come out during the day if they are rabid.
Where I am (western Washington) rabies has never been found in the wild raccoon population (or in any wild terrestrial mammal population--it's all bats and domestic animals), but still some people see a raccoon in the daytime and freak out over rabies.
In fact if a raccoon is out during the day the most likely reason is that there is a food shortage and it can't forage enough just at night. Sometimes there is a shortage because something decreased the food supply, and sometimes it is because the raccoon is pregnant and needs more food due to that. Daytime outings due to rabies is way way way below that even in places like the eastern US where rabies is widespread in their raccoon populations.
Every year around here we'll see the neighborhood raccoon start coming around in the daytime for a while, getting plumper and plumper, then she stops coming at all for a while, and then she shows up at night much thinner and with 2 to 5 little ones.
Nowadays we shouldn't be allowing cats to be outside unsupervised in any case, they can be devastating to local wildlife, including these clever cockatoos.
Former multiple cat owner here, every cat I have owned hunted successfully with multiple bells on their collars. My neighbours cat has bells and hunts in my yard. Bells don't work or don't work reliably enough.
The chipmunks around my house are dumb af. They get scared of the cat, but after 2 minutes of sitting still they're running right by him again. It's almost like they evolved to be food.
> Bells don't work. Cats are more than comfortable staying still enough to keep them silent.
Saw this with the neighbours cat, little sod is so smooth he doesn't ring the bell until he pounces and by then the bird already knows it's in deep shit.
My pair are indoor cats - they live longer and we are near a very busy road.
One might think so, but I saw a neighbor's declawed bell-laden cat routinely catch prey. The bell surely didn't help the cat, but the birds, mice, shrews, snakes, etc. needed more than a bell to save them.
Fully depends on the local wildlife. If the local fauna naturally devleoped alongside wildcats, such as in the UK, then outdoor cats are of very little concern to wildlife populations.
If they didn't, such as in Aus, then yeah they can be devastating.
In all its 13 years (and counting) our cat has taken maybe 5 birds, this includes the swallow he noticed flying by at ~1.5 meters height upon which he jumped straight up in the air and caught it. Sad for the swallow but it was quite a feat of cat-dexterity. Anyway, he doesn't catch birds since there are more than enough voles, mice, rats, squirrels and weasels - no idea why he catches those but he's done so several times - around to keep him satisfied. He eats nearly everything he catches but tends to leave the weasels mostly uneaten. He also does not like squirrel tails which became clear when I cleaned up under the stairs where I found 5 of them.
Maybe I should add I live on a farm? If it were not for the cat we'd have to take care of the vermin he dispatches in some other way so hooray for the cat.
Very few of the catches are usually known to the owner.
It’s tricky to study since you pretty much need to introduce cats to areas with stable bird populations. We’ve had birds relocate and start new nests elsewhere because they see cats around though, and even magpies are extremely reluctant to eat food put out for them near the yard where the cats sometimes hang out.
> In all its 13 years (and counting) our cat has taken maybe 5 birds
reminder: what you see is not what you get.
cats kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds a year, study says. Outdoor cats are the leading cause of death among both birds and mammals in the United States, according to a new study, killing 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion birds each year.
The mammalian toll is even higher, concluded researchers from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, ranging from 6.9 billion to 20.7 billion annually.
The study found each feral cat kills an average 576 native birds, mammals and reptiles per year, while pet cats kill an average of 110 native animals every year – 40 reptiles, 38 birds and 32 mammals.
In Australia 3.7 million domestic cats kill 230 million native birds every year.
OP numbers are in the realm of not being plausible, unless the cat lives in a cage.
As a cat owner I could believe in 5 in a year, or one every 2-3 months, that's possible, low but possible. I can't honestly believe in 5 in 13 years, for a normal, non disabled cat.
Numbers I gave you are consistent with the 100 million cats that live in USA (15-30 birds killed by each cat every year on average)
The posters cat likely spends much more of its time on mammals as targets than on birds (the post does imply it takes a large harvest of vermin mammals).
I estimate 83k coyotes in north american urban areas. (Extrapolating from 2014 estimate that 2,000 coyotes lived in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.)
Cats are 20-40% of urban coyote diets. Wild ass guess that a 40lb coyote needs to eat about 5lbs per week (based on recommended food allowance for captive coyote). For yearly total of 260lbs. Average cat weighs 10lbs? So each coyote eats 5.2 - 10.4 cats per year.
So let's say coyotes eat 83k * 5.2 = 431,600 cats per year.
A comment above says a domestic cat eats ~38 birds per year.
So urban coyotes save 16,400,800 birds per year.
(Too little is known about wild coyotes and cats for me to even guesstimate.)
Yes, but the cat is fed inside the house as well, leading to a huge overpopulation of predators. That's not the natural order of things.
A normal predator that devastates the local ecosystem because there are too many will run out of food and then go down in numbers until some sort of equilibrium is restored. Doesn't happen with pets.
On top of that cats are actually not local to most places in the world. So they are an introduced predator which the local wildlife didn't develop defenses for.
I also wonder if you would accept the same argument if the neighbors dog would maul your cat (or even your child)
The cats are provided as sacrafice to protect the children, once the coyotes get a taste for the flesh of children the rest of humanity will be in danger.
I know that cats eat a lot of birds, but I wonder how often cats really is the limiting factor of the population. Other things like scarcity of food or nesting places might often be more important.
The situation in australia is very different from other regions, in a previous discussion on HN we've already established that for central europe, domestic cats have a negligible effect on wildlife. (As in, orders of magnitudes below the next higher causes, which are mostly wild cats and pesticides).
And i'm sure mining for coal, building ever expanding suburbs or driving cars doesn't contribute to killing any bird or mammal.. I'd need the figures but i'm convinced that human activities are far more dangerous for other animals than the activities of our pets.
When you look at the numbers, it is very, very, hard to deny that free-ranging unowned cats are the largest limiting factor to the population. The size of the cat population causing a mortality swing of 24% in birds, is not some small number that might be masked by another closesly related statistic.
The number of cats in an area should be pretty closely related to the number of people living in the area. The more cats, the more people, and it would not be hard to believe that having more people in an area might lead to more environmental destruction and displaced habitats.
The control featured in the paper is Europe, where the domestic cat is younger and not as well adapted, environmentally, as that in America. There is significantly less environmental destruction, despite the controls featuring similar numbers of the animals. Simply having cities has not had a similar effect.
"I know we messed with the environment and the result has been devastating, but we should remember the environment is a harsh place and likely lots of stuff would have died even if we didn't meddle."
Cats in Australia kill a total of 377 MILLION birds per year[1] (99% of which are native species)
Of course it would. About 43000 people die in car accidents in the US every year. That is apparently considered acceptable in a population of 332 million people. If the population was one million people, what would most likely be considered horrendous.
I admit that my standards regarding death of critters are somewhat different than death of people, but the total population do matter there too. 6 million deers are shot in the US every year in a population of 25 million. People don't seem to be very upset about that, but rather concerned that the population still is rising. Many people are very upset that any rhinos at all are killed.
And as the example with deers show, you can cull some populations quite heavily without any apparent ill effects.
“There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.” is of course a great quip. But in defense of us dumb human tourists, it should also be noted that bears have a much higher personal incentive to get into the garbage, and they sometimes can simplify parts of the puzzle by brute force.
"Leave no trace" is very important (and point taken -- some people don't take it seriously enough and it reflects quite poorly on them), but bears are facing hunger and possibly even starvation if they don't find some food source.
Also the bears are usually not holding a baby, and a bottle of rum, and a deckchair and their backpack in one hand, trying to drop the rubbish in with one hand. So you have to at least try to design this for one handed human opening, where the bear has two paws to bring to bear (so to speak)
Former forest ranger (great summer internship!), so plenty of experience with dumb tourists, but your comment shows a severe lack of empathy for parents of small children.
Consider, for example, that while you could put the thing down, it might:
I was mostly suggesting putting the deckchair and bag down rather than the child. But if you did put the child down and it ate some trash, started crying, and ran off in to the woods to get eaten by a bear, I think that's just Darwinism at work. You can't fight evolution.
I would also add that if your child managed to eat trash, started crying and ran off into the woods within the 20s that it might take to put things into a rubbish bin, then you shouldn't be too worried because it seems to have the survival skills to live in the forest and outrun the meanest predators.
Parenting is exactly like that; the puzzle is especially analogous when you're outnumbered. The 1-year-old cannot walk but will eat anything he can get his hands on, the 3 year old can fit between the bars on the bridge but does not have the finger strength needed to release the latch on the carseat, the 5 year old can mantle up a 36" ledge and runs at 8 mph but can assist with caring for the 1-year-old for a maximum of 48.6 seconds before one or the other loses focus...
The good news is that after a few years, these safety puzzles become those mathematics problems where the minivan can carry 7 and drives at an average of 40 mph, Suzy can bike to soccer practice at 12mph but only before sunset, Mike's mom is driving south on the freeway at 70 mph and if you drive north on the back roads at 40 mph, the question is which exit should you choose to meet her at so that the crock pot does not overcook dinner before you turn around?
As a current parent, I can not envision a situation where it is not possible to put down a child in order to open a rubbish bin with two hands.
I mean there are lots of other situations that occur regularly which require you to put a child you're carrying somewhere else. I mean how do you think parents of more than one child manage?
Yes, humans might spend an hour and give up, and complain about the time the spent getting the container to work, while a wild animal will spend every waking moment to bypass the container's defense mechanisms.
Wow, they're using one-latch bins now? As far as I can recall from back when I cycled through the Rockies in the summer of 2000, the bins in the national parks all had two such latches that needed to be operated simultaneously to open the lid.
Maybe that design proved too challenging for the tourists.
What humans have is leverage, due to having language. This is a giant intelligence multiplier. The next multiplier was writing. The next printing. The next is computer networks.
Communication gives us the ability to coordinate with and teach others, which is an incredible advantage. We can build on what other humans learn, rather than having to rediscover it.
I sometimes wonder why this ability is so limited in other intelligent animals.
For the Park Service, they can print instructions and put them on the garbage can, or a ranger can explain it to the person.
They just have a non-locking carabiner clip on the bin on a metal cable. It's actually really easy to use. So whatever was true back in the 1980s or the early '00s is no longer a problem.
I've often wondered if it is convenience rather than IQ that is the limiting factor for this. If I approach a bin with two hands full of garbage, how much time am I going to spend using half a hand to open an elaborate lock mechanism? Not much.
In addition, if someone reaches the "I need two hands to open this and both hands are full" stage and can not figure out a solution, it would appear that IQ is still the limiting factor.
Falsehoods programmers believe about visitors to national parks:
1. everyone has a phone that has a camera
2. everyone has a phone that has internet access
3. everyone's internet access works at all times
4. everyone's phone has charge at all times
... etc
Sorry that was a bit mean but I couldn't help it :) If you're not familiar with the format, there's a number of "falsehoods programmers believe about X" articles, for example:
For what it's worth I don't think it's a huge ask to request visitors to carry their rubbish away with them when they visit somewhere like this. If you managed to bring it out there you can surely take it back.
5. The system can run autonomously for any length of time.
6. A tech worker can be on site in short order to repair it when it phones home to report that it has malfunctioned.
7. Vandalism is not common and not particularly attracted to electronic devices.
... etc
> For what it's worth I don't think it's a huge ask to request visitors to carry their rubbish away with them when they visit somewhere like this. If you managed to bring it out there you can surely take it back.
Yet more falsehoods programmers believe about visitors to national parks:
1. That refraining from throwing their trash around is not a huge ask for some of them.
Depends on the park, I guess. Any electronic system will definitely require electricity, at least! Involving a QR code and a website seems to add a lot of complexity (what if the camper's phone is out of juice, what if they just have a flip phone, what if they just didn't bring their phone with them to the garbage? Plus we'll need a network connection).
An electronic keypad might work, still need electricity but it is a lot simpler. IMO you'd want something that doesn't require even simple written instructions -- I mean rarely, but still occasionally you might get a visitor with limited English literacy (people from other countries, etc). But a keypad with a number over printed above it should be kind of obvious... or a combination lock with the same. Although you'll always get somebody who doesn't make the link.
> An electronic keypad might work, still need electricity but it is a lot simpler.
There are mechanical keypads where you have to press three buttons simultaneously.
> Although you'll always get somebody who doesn't make the link.
I once came home to see the apartment block superintendent overseeing the installation of a new mechanical keypad. The door was covered with sticky notes saying "130" over and over again, but I still almost asked him what the new code was going to be.
>> An electronic keypad might work, still need electricity but it is a lot simpler. [...] or a combination lock [...]
> There are mechanical keypads where you have to press three buttons simultaneously.
The combination lock has the benefit of being a little more familiar.
>> Although you'll always get somebody who doesn't make the link.
> I once came home to see the apartment block superintendent overseeing the installation of a new mechanical keypad. The door was covered with sticky notes saying "130" over and over again, but I still almost asked him what the new code was going to be.
It makes sense that you'd be confused -- what's the point of a keypad with the combination on the door? Unless bears are breaking into the apartment!
This does seem to indicate a problem with the keypad/combination lock idea though. Since most people are familiar with them as a form of human-blocking access control, they might not assume the number above is the password (somebody might think it is an ID number for the garbage can, for example).
I'm sure there will be a ML guy here telling us we could train a NN to recognize bears on the camera and lock the bins (will probably lock out the bins whenever a child brings a teddy bear toy/shirt and or randomly at a small enough percentage that it will annoy people but won't be worth fixing)
I mean, the city I live in spent an absurd amount of money installing the latest and greatest solar powered, WiFi enabled, somewhat compacting garbage cans.
Because a prankster will replace the QR code with one that pops open a different can just behind you. Hopefully it's on a timer and closes just before you can get there for maximum fun.
We have underground trash bins that need a keycard to unlock and open and are designed in such a way that you can't reach in when it's opened; something like that, maybe with a camera with basic facial / human detection. But nothing internet connected or requiring people's electronics, they go there to escape from that.
Right now? Cost to implement and maintain. Who is going to fund it?
Back in the 80s when this story & quote comes from? Money may have been relatively flush then, but the tech was not available (at least not in a form that could be realistically rolled out park-wide) no matter the funds offered.
That's not reading, though. My son can do what these crows can: associate familiar symbols with some concept: "green cross" means pharmacy, "Auchan" means the big shop with carts. However, he is disabled and can't read in the sense of "process novel information provided in textual form".
> Have a QR code printed on the bin that simply leads to a website
This comment is the perfect specimen of why our industry is a fucking joke. It should be illegal for us to call ourselves engineers.
This is how a vending machine that takes coins gets replaced by a vending machine that requires internet, a smartphone, two apps and three passwords to buy a water bottle.
This is how you get critical infrastructure like elevators where display showing floor number lags (!), it needs wifi and the elevator goes down for software updates.
Since this is waste - why not provide an easy way for them to access it such that they don't make a mess? Some thoughts:
1) Could making it available be more effort than trying to restrict access?
2) The food is bad for them? But they are eating it anyway it seems. Will they adapt over time? Since humans are taking all their natural spaces away - why not encourage species to adapt to what we leave them?
3) Their adaptation makes them dependent on us... but only the ones that live around us. Besides - are we imagining a future where we aren't here? If no, then why not help them?
A great thought, but much of our waste is outright dangerous to animals. Think sharp half-opened cans that bears cut their tongues on, plastic multipack can straps that the necks of smaller animals get stuck in.
If you want to make waste accessible, you'll have to separate it into stuff safe for animals, and the rest, and since many tourists can hardly clean up after themselves, this seems like a herculean task to me. Plus encouraging possibly dangerous animals to get close to human areas might not be the smartest thing to do.
You're assuming that the mess is a side effect rather than the end goal with Cockatoos. Don't forget we are talking about an animal that evolved with a flag on their head that goes up to indicate the level of chaos in the area is about to increase
This could be sold as freedom of the marketplace with bears now able to bid for waste management which is rebranded as recycling.
I have ten sparrows that I put food out for in the middle of the city. This attracts pigeons, that the neighbours are not keen on. The sound of a distant crow and they are off, however, they will wait there for a speck of grain that gets dislodged by a sparrow all day. The area has been devised so that specks of grain only fall into sparrow only areas but there is still the chance.
The golden rule is to not feed the animals. I am breaking it selfishly, those sparrows would be a pair, if that. When I move, or when I can't justify their food bill (£1 a day), they will just die.
Haven't seen many cockatoos go for rubbish where I live (they like the bugs more) but if they're anything like the crows at my old school they make a lot of mess when they open a bin. The crows used to lift a rather heavy metal lid and then scatter rubbish everywhere.
Perhaps we'll be memorialized (since we'll surely wipe ourselves out at some point) in bear or cockatoo legends as the weird hairless/featherless trickster gods that gave them the puzzle-making that kicked off their societies. Probably not, but it is funny to think about.
Cockatoos can be highly intelligent. They're known to be able to solve fairly complicated puzzles and have the added bonus of having bolt cutters for a face.
Nicely shot videos. I have these birds in my area every day. Might need to dust off the 3d printer and make some puzzles. But it's challenging to keep cockies from destroying plants in the garden. I need a solution to that problem first.
That’s the trade-off. We can go to the stars with insane cockatoos who manipulate space-time and sometimes kill everyone for kicks, or we can stay grounded forever.
No mention of the Ibis, unaffectionately known as the Bin Chicken. But in the denser cities, they are mangey bin foragers who break open garbage bags, fight and make a mess. I quite like them as they are not a pain in my city, they are quite elegant in their full glory.
With a wingspan that can be up to 40-50inches/100-125cm wingspan they are a surprisingly big bird to be lurking around the city. I definitely wouldn't want to make one mad.
Toronto went through this with raccoons opening the compost bins. It was bad enough that there were several commercial after-market add-ons for sale at hardware stores, and an active DIY scene trading tips online.
Seagulls in the UK were doing it for decades, I saw 3 seagulls cooperating to lift lid of a container. Maybe stop pretending that opening a lid is a complex thing?
Clearly someone has never seen three yellow crested cockatoos working together to move a brick off of a wheely bin lid before ... that worked, like, five or six years ago for maybe a summer or two.
See Article Title "Arms Race"
Also, "bin guys" no longer get out of bin truck, it's a camera guided hydraulic arm that reaches out and lifts the bin these days- that leaves a problem with bricks littering the ground after truck passes down street.
You can't expect non-Aussies to understand the ingeniousness of our birds. Like the maggie who can nick me precisely on the ear lobe exposed by my bike helmet. Or the Kookaburra who can swoop down to extract, mid flight, a slice of meat from a sandwich held by an unsuspecting tourist.
This actually functions similar to a controlled burn and helps prevent larger, more devastating bushfires from occurring when too much fuel builds up, and also rejuvenates many kinds of plants for which fire is an essential part of its lifecycle. It's fascinating.
Similarly, Australian Ravens are great. Characterful and bright. The young have a great sense of fun and are entertaining to watch. I have seen them playing a game of chase round the garden, play-fighting over a prized mango leaf. Adults are oddly risk-averse given their heft. Smaller birds seem able to intimidate them quite easily.
Odd by comparison to the smaller magpies, currawongs, blue-faced honeyeaters & noisy miners that can so readily shoo them off. They're pretty shy with people too, which isn't true of many common urban birds. Though that shyness may have quite separate origins (humans being what they are and all that).
I wonder if it's a behavioural strategy somehow related to their carrion-scavenging niche.
The article mentions people using cable ties to anchor bottles of water, and using sand shoes as a wedge on the hinge. Two adaptive techniques which get around the Cockie's ability to heave bricks off.
The article also mentions the MEME quality of what technique is used in what suburb or street: the idea spreads by observation. What works in one street flows down the street. Another street may adopt a different technique.
> For example, one person commented: “Bricks seemed to work for a while, but cockies got too clever. Neighbours on other side of highway suggested sticks. They work.”
I then felt it best to post a video of the bird knocking so people didn't think I was crazy. They knock with their beak: tap tap tap. Gets annoying when they do it at 6am to wake you up.
Recently I have noticed cockatoos raiding the bins in Sydney, it's definitely a thing.