Parrots that made video calls to other parrots felt less isolated and engaged in more social behavior like preening and singing, research published in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems showed.
In the wild, this tiny bird lives in large flocks. However, as pets, they are kept alone or in small groups with a detrimental effect on their mental health – they feel isolated, bored and even engage in self-harm like feather-plucking. Video callings to some extent imitated the experience of living in a flock in the wild.
Dr. Jennifer Cunha of Northeastern University – one of the authors of the research – told British media that parrots “seemed to grasp” the fact that they were engaging with their peers since their behavior resembled that observed during real-life interactions between birds.
Another insight highlighted by research was that there are parrot socialites – birds who called other birds most often were most popular phone choices by other parrots. In other words, the parrots who wanted to chat more got more calls from other birds.
Researchers analyzed more than 1,000 hours of footage of 18 pet parrots who made 147 video calls. They claim that they came across the idea of this research during the COVID pandemic, when people coped with isolation by video calling. The general conclusion is that video-friendship likewise has benefits for pets.
The parrots for the research were chosen among users of Parrot Kindergarten, an educational social network for parrot owners.