Another Cultural Leap; Green Herons

MelsAuntie

June 24, 2013 9:40 pm

Another cultural leap...
It's late, I'm exhausted, and not going to google this now to find out WHICH zoo, but I read this years back in, I think, Audubon magazine.
There is a public zoo which ha a population of green herons, a small short-legged native heron, we see them along our river. These birds did not belong to the zoo; they flew in on their own and stayed because of the fish in the ponds. People would buy popcorn and throw it to the peafowl, ducks, and the fish. One green heron noticed that when people threw popcorn in the water, fish came to the surface. It started following the visitors around, and when somebody threw popcorn to the fish, the heron would wade out, wait until the fish came to the surface, and with the unerring aim and blinding speed of its kind, Bam. Fish dinner.
At one point this bird made a stunning cognitive leap; if humans could throw popcorn in the water, so could the heron. It would swoop down and grab the popcorn thrown to peafowl, for instance, then wade stealthily out into the water and carefully let the popcorn float. Aha! No more stalking and waiting. Popcorn in the water = fish right now. By now this heron was getting a lot of attention, from the zookeepers, the media, and other green herons coming to check out why this one guy caught so many fish. To the bird behaviorists' delight, more and more of them started using this technique, and taught it to their chicks, and now there is a small local population of green herons at that zoo that are tool users ( popcorn), and supporting themselves very well. No other herons have done this, at the time of the article. Amazing....