Sulphur-crested cockatoos in western Sydney have learned to use twist-handle water fountains to drink, Australian researchers have found.

The team recorded the clever cockies gripping the valve and lowering their weight to twist it – with almost one in two (46 per cent) getting the water to work.

The habit was first spotted by Barbara Klump, a behavioural ecologist now at the University of Vienna.

She noticed cockatoos drinking from public water fountains in Sydney’s west in 2018. Klump initially thought someone had forgotten to turn off the water, but video footage from her research project showed a bird operating the handle with its foot.

“Then, of course, a million questions went through my mind … How the hell did it figure that out?” she told The New York Times.

It also follows some cockatoos in western Sydney learning to open rubbish bins, much to the annoyance of home owners. That habit has since spread to the birds across the city and prompted at least one local council to take drastic action.

Klump’s observations led to a more recent study of 200 birds over 44 days, which was reported in The Royal Society Biology Letters this week.

One co-author, Lucy Aplin, a behavioural and cognitive ecologist at the Australian National University, said the birds had to coordinate their actions to get water from the spring-loaded bubblers.

“It’s just one of your bog-standard old-fashioned drinking fountains that you find all across sports fields in Australia,” she said.

“They [cockatoos] hold on to the stem and they twist with their foot but then they have to lean their weight while they twist as well.

“They don’t have the amount of strength that we have in our hand or the weight so they have to lean their whole body weight to keep it twisted.”

Aplin said the process looked a “bit funny”, but was effective.

“It’s a bit of an awkward body position they have to hold, but it’s pretty impressive,” she said.

The study compared the water-fountain technique to the bin-opening, “where 54 per cent of attempts by marked birds were successful, suggesting similarities in either their physical difficulty or time taken to learn”.

“Unlike the bin-opening innovation, where 32 per cent of marked individuals in the local population attempted, here an estimated 70 per cent of marked individuals attempted, with no evidence for ongoing spread,” researchers said.

“This suggests that the drinking fountain innovation had already undergone extensive social diffusion prior to the study.”

During the extensive study of the birds, the scientists noted they’d choose a drinking fountain even when other water was readily available in nearby streams or creeks. And they would wait up to 10 minutes for a turn at the bubbler.

“They appear to be quite willing to queue for a considerable amount of time,” Aplin said.

Klump said there might be a simple explanation.

“If there is no super urgent need and you’re not dying of thirst, then why not do something you enjoy?” she said.

She said the behaviour was likely to spread, given the cleverness of cockatoos. They are also likely to come up with other ways to operate fountains, including those that work differently.

“They’re so innovative and good at problem solving that they seem to eventually figure out a solution,” Klump said.

“In a weird way, cockatoos constantly surprise me, but I’m also never that surprised.”