Parrots season their own food, study finds, with their favorite food being 'pasta with blueberry-flavored soy yogurt'
Humans are not the only ones who add flavor to food to enjoy gourmet food. In the past,
Innovative flavoring behavior in Goffin's cockatoos: Current Biology
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00002-8
Cockatoos prefer their noodles dunked in blueberry yogurt: First evidence of non-primate food flavoring behavior
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-cockatoos-noodles-dunked-blueberry-yogurt.html
In a paper published in the scientific journal Current Biology on February 10, 2025, Jeroen Stephan Seewald and Aries Marie Isabelle Auersperg of the Messerli Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna reported that they had confirmed that the Japanese cockroach also exhibits the 'dunking behavior' of dipping food in liquid to flavor it, a behavior that had previously only been observed in Japanese macaques .
If you play the video below, you can see the parrot actually dipping the yogurt in its food and eating it.
A movie of a parrot seasoning food - YouTube
A parrot carries a spiral of pasta-like noodles in its beak.
The food was placed in a container containing blueberry-flavored yogurt.
It skillfully holds the food, which is covered in plenty of yogurt, with its feet and eats it by tearing it off little by little with its beak.
The impetus for the study came when, in 2022, two of the parrots kept at the Messerli Institute were accidentally spotted dipping pieces of cooked potato that had been served to them for breakfast into blueberry-flavored soy yogurt.
To systematically investigate this behavior, the researchers presented 18 parrots with food bowls containing potatoes and noodles, and gave them access to three flavored liquids: fresh water, blueberry-flavored soy yogurt, and plain soy yogurt.
In this experiment, which was conducted 14 times for 30 minutes each during breakfast time, 9 out of 18 parrots dipped their food into yogurt, while none of them dipped their food in water. In addition, the parrots chose noodles an average of 12 times compared to potatoes an average of 6 times, and blueberry flavor was chosen more often than plain yogurt.
In other words, the parrots liked the noodles seasoned with blueberry yogurt the most. The research group speculates that this may be because the twisted structure of the pasta makes it easier for the yogurt to stick to the noodles. Additional tests confirmed that the parrots preferred the combination of noodles and blueberry yogurt over noodles or yogurt alone.
The behavior of soaking food in liquids is seen in other animals, but what stands out in this experiment is that it is clearly for the purpose of flavoring. According to the research group, it has been previously known that the behavior of animals soaking food in water can be divided into five functions: 'softening,' 'cleaning,' 'flavoring,' 'drowning prey,' and 'transporting liquid.'
Since the bait used in the experiment was not live, we can exclude the possibility that the bait was drowned. Secondly, the potatoes and noodles were clean, so there was no need to wash them. Also, none of the parrots put food in fresh water, and the noodles and potatoes were cooked and soft, so it is unlikely that they needed to be soaked in water. If they wanted to, they could eat the yogurt on its own, so we can also exclude the possibility that the bait was used as a tool to transport liquids.
Based on these findings, the research group concluded that the parrot's behavior was likely intended to flavor the food.
As mentioned above, only two birds were found to have dunked at first, but in this experiment the number increased to nine, suggesting that the habit of seasoning food is widespread. The research group plans to further investigate how this food 'innovation' spreads among parrots in the future.
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