We may all hate them — but it seems parrots don’t mind video calls

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Four years ago and almost overnight, the world went digital. With workers globally sent home as governments started issuing pandemic warnings, companies were forced to adopt new, online ways of working.

Today, the thought of joining yet another video conferencing call fills many of us with dread, and recent years have seen multiple studies highlighting the worker fatigue associated with endlessly using digital tools to connect with colleagues.

However, a new study (admittedly on parrots) reckons that chatting with friends, family and even colleagues through the screen could actually be good for our mental health.

Parrots love video calls (yes, we typed that right)

A recent study by the University of Glasgow and Northeastern University, exploring how parrots interact with video chat technology and video recordings, found that the social creatures exhibit a preference for real-time conversations with other parrots.

Conducted over six months, the small-scale study only involved nine parrots. However, the researchers found that the birds displayed the same sorts of interactions as they would in real life when connecting with others over the Internet.

From the parrots’ perspective, they were taught to initiate video calls by ringing a bell and selecting a bird from a screen.

The parrots’ caregivers also recorded the (less) positive impact of the birds watching pre-recorded videos, emphasizing how more human interactions can help workers feel more connected at work compared with receiving an email or instant message.

For many workers, remote and hybrid working continues to offer the flexibility that they want and need, and this study shows that video calls can be an effective way of socializing without having to travel to the office.

Another promising result of the study is that a more animal-centered Internet could help enrich the lives of animals in captivity, which gives us a glimpse of a potentially lucrative market that could follow in the years (or decades) to come.