Video of the Day: Helpful Birds

For the first time, altruistic behaviors have been seen in birds in a lab setting. African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) will spontaneously help each other obtain food even when there is no obvious benefit to the helper, according to a new study published in Current Biology on January 9. Désirée Brucks of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and Auguste von Bayern of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany studied helping behavior in eight African grey parrots. They placed t