ByGrrlScientist,
Senior Contributor.
A new study reports that parrots who are strangers to each other “test the waters” by forming new relationships through a series of increasingly friendly interactions that are much like developing friendships in humans.
Parrots are highly social beings, so it may come as a surprise to learn that it takes them a little time to actually befriend each other. To understand how they develop social relationships, a team of researchers studied and documented the process that parrots who are strangers to each other followed to make new friends.
“It can be really difficult to study how animals form new relationships and we don’t know how this process works for a lot of social animals,” said the study’s lead author, behavioral ecologist Claire O’Connell, who was a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati during this study.
