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takyon writes:

"Laughter" and intelligent play behaviors have been observed in a New Zealand species of parrot:

For the first time in birds, researchers say they have found evidence that a New Zealand parrot has the avian equivalent of an infectious laugh. They call it "positive emotional contagion" — which they define as "outwardly emotional actions that spread from one individual to another." In humans, this is what happens when one person hears another laugh and starts cracking up themselves. And in research published in Current Biology [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.02.020] [DX], the researchers say that when kea parrots hear a call associated with play, they start playful tussling, aerial acrobatics, or throwing objects into the air.

The kea, native to the mountains of New Zealand, is known to be particularly intelligent, curious and social. It's also nationally endangered.

Lead author Raoul Schwing of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna's Messerli Research Institute tells the Two-Way that during the course of his research, he had noticed that the parrot's warbling call almost always happened during times of play. He and his co-researchers from the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury decided to test the effect of playing recordings of the playful call to parrots at a lookout point in Arthur's Pass National Park. Schwing says they were trying to determine the meaning of the call — was it seen as an invitation to play from another bird? Or was simply hearing this type of call enough to make the bird want to play, even if it wasn't with the bird making the call? To their surprise, it appears to be the latter. "In many, many cases, the bird started to play spontaneously when there was no play going on before," he says.

Original Submission