Uploaded January 2014 | Updated September 2026, 10 hours ago

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The elite club of tool-making animals has a new member: a Goffin’s cockatoo named Figaro who lives in an aviary west of Vienna. After witnessing Figaro use a stick to retrieve a pebble, biologists placed a cashew outside his cage, just beyond his reach, and filmed what happened next.

The bird chewed off a 2½-inch splinter of wood from a beam in his aviary and used it to rake the nut toward him until he could grab the treat through the wire mesh with his beak. The trick, which took him about 25 minutes the first time, was no fluke, the researchers found: Figaro repeated the same strategy in nine out of 10 trials.

Read the full story at: discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/a-crafty-tool-making-cockatoo

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Credit: Alice Auersperg/University of Vienna

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