Parrots Video Calling Their Friends To Prevent Loneliness Prefer A Live Chat

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Ap-parrot-ly the birds used the Facebook Messenger system to video call each other.

The birds were given the opportunity to call another live bird or watch pre-recorded footage. 

Image credit: University of Glasgow

Providing stimulation for your pet can be one of the most engaging things you can do as an animal owner, whether it be exercise, puzzle games, or toys to entertain your furry friend. Parrots have been found to enjoy video calling other parrots as a way to beat loneliness, but now further research has found they enjoy live calls much more than pre-recorded videos.

Previous research has shown just how much pet parrots enjoy calling other birds via video, but now nine parrots have been given the choice between live and pre-recorded content on digital devices. 

After an initial meet-and-greet where the birds were introduced to each other online, the pets were then given access to the digital devices over 12 sessions for a total of 36 hours. Six sessions were live calls and six were pre-recorded video content.  

During a six-month period the researchers tracked the engagements of the birds on a call with another bird live or watching the pre-filmed content. The team found that the birds seemed to enjoy live calls to another bird more, were more engaged in the live chats, and spent longer using the digital devices when a live call was happening. In total the birds spent 561 minutes on live calls and only 142 minutes on the playback videos. They also triggered live calls more often.

"Some caregivers believed that their parrots were capable of differentiating between the sessions. One told us that their bird enjoyed vocalising with another live bird but quickly lost interest when there was no response to their calls during pre-recorded videos," said Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, from the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science and the paper's lead author, in a statement. 

Around half of the owners of the birds (55 percent) suggested that the birds enjoyed all the calls, suggesting they benefited from the pre-recorded footage, while 77 percent thought that they responded well to the live calls.  

Dr Hirskyj-Douglas said: "This was a small study, and we can't draw any definite conclusions at this stage about whether the parrots were in some way aware of the differences between live and pre-recorded interactions. However, the results are compelling, and suggest that further study is definitely warranted."

The study will be presented at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.