Bruce, a 13-year-old kea in New Zealand, long ago lost the top half of his beak. It didn’t prevent his climb to the top. Credit. In 2021, a disabled parrot named Bruce made headlines worldwide for creating his own prosthetic beak.
He didn’t stop there: Scientists reported on Monday that Bruce has now become the alpha male of his group. And he did it by learning to joust.
The new research, published in Current Biology, is an important addition to a small but growing number of observations that demonstrate just how resilient animals with disabilities can be, said Alice Auersperg, a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna who was not involved in the study.
“The link between innovation and disability in animals is important and completely understudied,” she said. Bruce is a 13-year-old kea, a species found only in New Zealand. These seagull-size parrots live together in groups, known as circuses, that can number in the dozens.
Keas were viewed as pests until the past few decades, because they sometimes attack sheep when their regular food supply runs short. As recently as the 1980s, the New Zealand government paid bounties for dead keas, helping to drive down their numbers to fewer than 5,000.
The bounties are gone, but keas still face grave threats. The curious birds get injured trying to steal food from rat traps, for example. That’s what scientists suspect happened to Bruce when he was a youngster. When they discovered him in the wild, his entire top beak had been snapped off.
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