Tomas Morsing, 57, and Olof Morsing, 20, use a “task and reward” system to harness the bird species' intelligence toclear rubbish in their neighborhood.
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.
The Morsings have recorded 5,000 magpies approaching the gadget to give up their offerings — that’s between five to 30 magpie visitors a day — over the past ten months.
Tomas, who works in the pharmaceutical industry, went part-time at the end of 2020 to focus on new innovative projects. He brought in Olof, who had an interest in maths, programming, and engineering, to bring his bird feeder/trash receptacle idea to life.
“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,” Olof, from Gothenburg, Sweden, told SWNS.
“We started recording footage to understand the magpies and to be able to train them to use the bird feeder,” he added of how the bird-powered contraption became a success.
SWNS
After watching the footage, the duo decided to put their bird feeder on a platform, then set a timer to regularly release seeds so that the magpies knew they could get food from the platform.
“When they got comfortable with the machine, we added some litter all over the platform and close to the hole. The magpies were rewarded when they accidentally pushed something down the hole,” Olof shared. “The very intelligent magpies soon understood that pushing the litter down the hole meant they would receive food.”
Tomas and Olof feard that the birds would try to trick the machine with sticks and stones to release food without doing the good deed of recycling, but the magpies proved them wrong.
“We didn’t need the sorting mechanism at all. It turns out the magpies, once they’d been trained, only collect real litter,” Tomas said.
“We now have over 5,000 interactions between the machine and magpies. They have never collected and left anything else other than real litter,” he added.
source: people.com
