Parrots ‘tend to be left handed’
By ANIFriday, February 4, 2011
LONDON - Just like humans, parrots too choose to use one side of their body more than the other - with more of them left handed, or left footed, according to Australian researchers.
They found that virtually all the parrots they studied prefer to use either their left eye and left foot, or right eye and right foot, reports the Telegraph.
They examined roughly 320 parrots from 16 different Australian species.
“Basically, you get this very close relationship with the eye that they use to view the object and then the hand that they use to grasp it, and it’s very consistent across all the species except a couple,” said Calum Brown, lead author of the study.
“In some species, they’re so strongly right or left handed at the species level that there’s effectively no variation,” Brown said.
Ultimately, they found that roughly 47 per cent were left handed, 33 per cent right handed, and the remainder ambidextrous.
In addition, in some cases young birds appeared to experiment with both sides before finally settling on one.
The study was published in Biological Letters. (ANI)
