Kea are very playful. They're also annoyingly naughty. But they're beautiful and I love them.<p>Here's a story about Kea I heard from a park ranger when I was in New Zealand. The rangers have traps for non-native predators scattered throughout the park. The traps are basically a big mouse trap in a box (I think.) When going around to reset the traps they found that someone was setting them off with nothing inside. They thought it was hikers. So they set up some cameras.<p>Instead, it was the keas. They would come to the trap with a stick in their beaks. Then they'd use the stick to trigger the trap. It made a loud boom when it closed. They'd laugh and move to the next trap. They actually have a distinctive laugh (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N37rN29nUIc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N37rN29nUIc</a>)<p>I think they're one of those species, like octopi or maybe elephants, that are a lot smarter than we understand or know how to quantify. It's cool that they're getting the recognition they deserve. Even though they're little bastards.
In case any camera trap folk are here, I'm currently volunteering with the NZ Department of Conservation to build an AI-assisted image sorting tool that speeds up the weeding out of empty images.<p><a href="https://github.com/petargyurov/megadetector-gui" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/petargyurov/megadetector-gui</a><p>This is currently used to assist the conservation efforts of various endemic species such as the kakapo, kea and takahe. (The ML model used is not limited to just these species!)
I learned about that just yesterday, watching « Chris Packham's Animal Einsteins » ( <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000slks" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000slks</a> ) which might be OP source too :)
And article on the news (2020) <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-03-04/nz-kea-parrot-understand-probabilities/12018464" rel="nofollow">https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2020-03-04/nz-kea-parrot...</a>