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Parrots Can Dance
juuri sends in an NPR article about the consensus created among scientists that some birds actually dance to music. "The results of this study are reported in the journal Current Biology, along with another scientific paper inspired by YouTube videos of dancing animals. Adena Schachner is a graduate student in the psychology department of Harvard University. She says she was familiar with the idea that some people had made videos of birds supposedly dancing. ... She and her colleagues eventually analyzed more than 5,000 videos. 'Imagine watching YouTube eight hours a day for a month,' she says. 'That's pretty much what we did. It was amusing for perhaps the first couple of hours.'" juuri adds, "While this makes them somewhat unique in the animal world, as only three animals are now known to dance by verifiable proofs, what struck me more was that this was the first time YouTube had helped forge a new scientific understanding. Given the explosive growth of uploading videos and people watching them, what other new understandings and popular misconceptions will be proven or disproved due to this emerging media?"
I've got a Sun Conure, which happens to be the same bird in the picture in the summary. He's only 5 months old, so he's not all out dancing, but he does seem to be starting to respond to music, as he'll start to bob his head in time for a few seconds at a time. Search youtube for kimba's song, and you can see the Sun Conure groovin to a performing beatboxer.
I have a cockatiel and he's about eight years old. He has a little metal band around one of his feet, I guess to prove that he was domestically bred and not poached (not sure exactly). He does one thing that I've never seen another bird do, though it's not as extreme as actually dancing. If I play certain percussive music or if I drum on my desk with my fingers, he will tap that metal band against his wooden perch to either the same rhythm or the same rhythm with little variations.
Sometimes he'll do this as a sort of "Simon" game where I'm supposed to match his little drum-solo and then he tries to match mine. It never occurred to me that birds would properly dance, though this one does make displays etc that are a lot like dancing. Either way, they definitely do have the required sense of rhythm. I've kept birds for a number of years and I can say that you can guess but you never really know for certain just how smart they are, except maybe to say "probably more than you think".
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I have a Bare-Eyed Cockatoo, and he dances constantly, all the while chanting "dance dance dance." He also chants "shake shake shake your booty" while dancing. I didn't try to teach him either of these things, he taught himself. Of course I taught him the words, but not on purpose, he just picked them up from me. I take him in the shower with me about once a week, and encourage him to shake off before I take him out of the shower stall by telling him to "shake your little white booty" and singing a bit of KC and the Sunshine Band. He also likes music, especially opera, and will sing along with the women, but not the men. He speaks to me with appropriate responses on a regular basis. If one of my other birds gets off its cage he will say "get back on your cage" at it. They are much smarter and aware than most people give them credit for.