Header Ads Widget

Dad and son teach magpies to put litter in the bin

Fun VLOG February 08, 2022

It may sound like a feather-brained scheme but a father and son’s plan of using magpies to pick up rubbish has got off to a flyer.

Tomas Morsing, 57, and Olof, 20, found a way to test the birds’ intelligence and clean up the streets in one fell swoop.

The pair set up a machine with a hole to place waste in and a chute controlled by a timer that regularly released seeds so the magpies knew they could get food.

They also programmed the machine to release a seed every time a piece of litter was deposited.

When the duo placed rubbish close to the hole, the birds soon realised they could earn a reward for binning items such as wrappers and cigarette ends.

After ten months, Tomas and Olof have recorded 5,000 deposits, with the clever birds dropping off five to 30 pieces of litter a day.

A father and son have created a fully-functional rubbish recycling machine that is completely run -- by MAGPIES. See SWNS story SWBRmagpies. Tomas Morsing, 57, and Olof, 20, (pictured) use a 'task and reward' system to harness the Corvid's intelligence to clear rubbish in their neighbourhood. The basic principle involves magpies picking up litter and placing it in a compartment where it is sorted - and seeds are released as a reward for the hungry birds. They have recorded 5,000 magpies approaching the contraption to give up their offerings - between five and 30-a-day - in 10 months.
The father and son team want to change our relationships with feathered animals (Picture: SWNS)
A father and son have created a fully-functional rubbish recycling machine that is completely run -- by MAGPIES. See SWNS story SWBRmagpies. Tomas Morsing, 57, and Olof, 20, use a 'task and reward' system to harness the Corvid's intelligence to clear rubbish in their neighbourhood. The basic principle involves magpies picking up litter and placing it in a compartment where it is sorted - and seeds are released as a reward for the hungry birds. They have recorded 5,000 magpies approaching the contraption to give up their offerings - between five and 30-a-day - in 10 months.
This graphic shows how the dropping mechanism works (Picture: SWNS)
What we have here are some very clever magpies (Picture: SWNS)

And remarkably they never try to cheat by putting twigs or leaves in the hole.

Olof, from Gothenburg, Sweden, said: ‘We wanted to show the potential of intelligent birds which coexist with humans and to demonstrate a way to solve a real problem in modern society.’

Tomas added: ‘We didn’t need the sorting mechanism at all. It turns out the magpies, once they’d been trained, only collect real litter.

‘We have now over 5,000 interactions between the machine and magpies. They have never collected and left anything else other than real litter.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.



from News – Metro https://ift.tt/k6oxLRe
Tags:

Post a Comment

0 Comments