RAVING MAD

Daft Or Punk? This Dancing Cockatoo Wants It Both Ways

By Elizabeth C.

HERE’S A COCKATOO LITERALLY SHAKING HER TAIL FEATHERS — and her head feathers -to Daft Punk’s Phoenix. Even more impressive is that she keeps the groove going for nearly all of a monotonic 3:43 minutes.

In case you are wondering, the bird’s an electronica snob. She will only dance to Daft Punk, and to this song in particular.

But she is not alone among her feathered friends who like to dance. A 2009 study coauthored by Harvard-trained Aniruddh D. Pateldocumented “experimental evidence for synchronization to a musical beat in a nonhuman animal.” Or, in layman’s terms, he studied a cockatoo named Snowball dancing.

“Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human,” Patel told the New York Times in 2010. “Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too?”

Via Gawker.