I saw this article yesterday and it got me to wondering whether I ever saw kits learning from watching older beavers. Have you? I did once see the father trying to show the kit how they lay logs on the dam. But she was having none of it. She wanted to do it her way with reeds and no wood.

Was she being stubborn or incapable of social learning?

I think now about the two “useless bookends“. Two yearlings from the original mom that died that never had a chance to learn from her. They never did any work at all until they had a new mom.

Macaws learn by watching interactions of others, a skill never seen in animals before

One of the most effective ways we learn is through third-party imitation, where we observe and then copy the actions and behaviors of others. Until recently, this was thought to be a unique human trait, but a new study published in Scientific Reports reveals that macaws also possess this ability.

Second-party imitation is already known to exist in the animal kingdom. Parrots are renowned for their ability to imitate human speech and actions, and primates, such as chimpanzees, have learned to open a puzzle box by observing a human demonstrator. But third-party imitation is different because it involves learning by observing two or more individuals interact rather than by direct instruction.

Scientists chose blue-throated macaws for this study because they live in complex social groups in the wild, where they need to learn new behaviors to fit in quickly. Parrots, like macaws, are also very smart and can do things like copy sounds and make tools.

To find out whether macaws could learn through third-party imitation, researchers worked with two groups of them, performing more than 4,600 trials. In the test group, these birds watched another macaw perform one of five different target actions in response to a human’s hand signals. These were fluffing up feathers, spinning its body, vocalizing, lifting a leg or flapping its wings. In the control group, macaws were given the same hand signals without ever seeing another bird perform the actions.

I am sure I saw beavers learn from other beavers. But did I ever see third person learning?

What did YOU see?