Cockatoos have an impressively wide repertoire of dance moves
A proclivity for dancing seems to be found in at least 10 species of cockatoo, and the birds will even jive to white noise or a financial podcast
By Chris Simms
6 August 2025
White cockatoos seem to have a natural proclivity for dancing
Andrew Angelov / Alamy
The headbang, the side-to-side and the body roll are some of at least 30 dance moves used by captive cockatoos.
Cockatoos have been grabbing limelight online ever since Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo , became an internet dance sensation back in 2009. Then, in 2019, Aniruddh Patel at Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues showed Snowball had invented 14 different movements and even combined some of them.
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To investigate how common such behaviour is, Natasha Lubke at Charles Sturt University in Australia and her colleagues analysed 45 videos posted on social media of dancing cockatoos. They included five different species: sulphur-crested, white , salmon-crested , Tanimbar corellas and little correllas .
The team identified 30 distinct dance moves each done by at least two birds, 17 of which had not previously been scientifically described. Closely-related species didn’t seem to strut their stuff in a more similar way.
Lubke and her colleagues also experimentally investigated dancing in two sulphur-crested cockatoos, two pink cockatoos and two galahs at the Wagga Wagga Zoo & Aviary in Australia.
