Welcome to the Clever Cockie Project, where we study the behaviour and cognition of sulphur-crested cockatoos. We aim to understand how cockatoos are successfully adapting to our cities, and if they might be using their big brains to do so. All of our results are open access and you can read about our findings here.

We primarily work in Sydney and Canberra, and as well as studying cockatoos directly, we rely on citizen-scientists to contribute data from across the urban landscape. Please help us out by filling out our annual bin-opening survey, and by reporting observations of marked birds and interesting behaviour.

The Clever Cockie Project (CULTURES ADAPT) is a 5-year research grant awarded by the European Research Council to Dr Lucy Aplin, and funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation. It is hosted by the University of Zurich, conducted in partnership with the Australian National University. 

The ethical aspects of the research have been approved by the Australian National University Ethics Research Ethics Committee (Protocol 2023/1302), and the Australian National University Animal Ethics Committee (Protocols 2023/18, 2023/07 & 2023/05). All fieldwork is conducted under NSW and ACT Scientific Licenses (License numbers SL102790 & LT20236).