Picture released by Australian Wildlife Conservancy on September 14, 2017 shows a feather from a "night parrot" which was found in South Australia, the first proof in more than a century that it lives there
A feather from one of the most elusive birds in the world has been found in South Australia, the first proof in more than a century that it lives there, wildlife experts said Thursday.
The "night parrot" ranks among the world's rarest avian species and was thought extinct until an intrepid Australian naturalist provided photo evidence of one in Queensland state in 2013.
It has since also been spotted in Western Australia.
The expert behind the Queensland sighting, John Young, and fellow ecologist Keith Bellchambers from the Australian Wildlife Conservancy have now shown it is also in South Australia.
The pair found a feather from the small, yellowish-green bird in the nest of a zebra finch around remote Lake Eyre while following up on blurry images from a camera trap in the area.
"Keith and I looked at many zebra finches' nests before finally an unmistakable small green feather appeared within the fresh base lining of one of the nests," said Young.
"People show excitement in many different ways, mine was to shake uncontrollably with numbing excitement and Keith's was sheer disbelief with his hands holding his head. An incredibly emotional time for both of us.
"In my eyes there was no doubt that this was the feather of a night parrot."
The freshness of the zebra finch nest indicates the feather may have been collected "within a few hundred metres in the past few weeks", Young added.
The curator of ornithology at the Western Australian Museum confirmed their find.
The next step is to map the distribution of the species, which was last recorded at Lake Eyre in 1883, and assess the population size using song meters and camera traps, said Young.
Researchers feared for decades that the nocturnal, desert-dwelling parrot was extinct, with no sightings between 1912 and 1979 and only a handful since, before the conclusive evidence in 2013.
In 2012, the Smithsonian Magazine rated it at number one among the world's five most mysterious birds.
Endemic to Australia, it is listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which estimates there are about 50-250 in the wild and declining.

Source:
University of Veterinary Medicine -- Vienna

A rattle will only make noise if you shake it. Animals like the wolf also understand such connections and are better at this than their domesticated descendants. Researchers say that wolves have a better causal understanding than dogs and that they follow human-given communicative cues equally well. The study provides insight that the process of domestication can also affect an animal's causal understanding.

A good example of the connection between cause and effect, is that an object which contains food produces noise when shaken. The study of an international research team at the Wolf Science Center of the Vetmeduni Vienna shows how animals deal with these rules of the physical world. Based on where dogs and wolves searched for food after receiving some hints about its location, they showed that our domesticated, four-legged companions cannot make the connection between cause and effect, but wolves can. These results indicate that domestication has changed the dogs' cognitive abilities.

Wolves understand cause and effect, dogs do not

The researchers Michelle Lampe from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Juliane Bräuer from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, Juliane Kaminski from the University of Portsmouth in England and Zsófia Virányi from the Vetmeduni Vienna in Austria investigated the reasoning abilities of 14 dogs and 12 human-socialized wolves. In this study, the animals had to make a choice between two objects, of which one contained hidden food and one was empty.

First of all, the researchers tested whether the animals can make use of communicative cues, such as direct eye-contact and pointing gestures to choose the correct object. Secondly, the dogs and wolves had to rely on behavioural cues, in which the experimenter only showed the location of the hidden food through her behaviour, without making any eye-contact with the animals. An example of this is reaching out to the correct object. Lastly, the animals had to make inferences about the location of the hidden food themselves, based on causal cues such as the noise produced by an object containing food when shaken.

Both dogs and wolves were able to follow communicative cues to find hidden food. However, without direct eye-contact, neither the dogs nor the wolves chose the correct object. In the absence of a human to show them where the food was located, only the wolves were able to make causal inferences. In this experiment, the wolves showed an understanding of cause and effect, which the dogs lacked.

Domestication is possibly the reason for a loss of causal understanding

"The results of our study suggest that domestication has affected the causal understanding of our dogs," says Lampe. "It cannot be excluded however, that the differences can be explained by the fact that wolves are more persistent to explore objects than dogs. Dogs are conditioned to receive food from us, whereas wolves have to find food themselves in nature."

"Our study is unique as it does not only compare dogs and wolves living under identical conditions, with a same history and training regime," Bräuer adds, "We also compared dogs living in packs to pets living with their human families." Therefore, the team was able to tease apart the influence of domestication from raising and living conditions. "The results of the dogs were independent of living conditions. This makes our study the first to make a valid comparison between these two animal groups in this particular set-up,' says Kaminski.

Also the wolves' use of cues in connection to eye-contact was an interesting finding for the researchers. "The wolves' ability to understand human communicative cues may have facilitated domestication," explains Virányi. "However, working with socialized wolves may have also impacted the results, as our animals are used to human contact. This could mask differences between the dogs and wolves, such as that dogs learn more easily about human communication throughout their lives."