This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman. Got a minute?

Of the many thousands of species of birds on earth, only about 25 are known to do something special with their food.

They dunk it in water before eating.

Nobody knows for sure why the birds do it.

It might moisten foods for easier eating,

or it might wash away nasty tasting chemicals.

The behavior is seen most often in super smart species like crows, and now it's been observed

for the first time in a bird called the Australian magpie.

We were very lucky to see it.

It was entirely by chance.

University of Cambridge zoologist Eleanor Drinkwater.

And so on a day-to-day basis, we'd kind of get up and we would essentially spend hours and hours

following these different families of magpies around the place and tempt them towards us and then

see how they reacted when we presented them with different foods.

The researchers offered an adult male magpie the mountain Katie did, an insect that's presumed

to be distasteful. It's thought that the insect defends itself against being gobbled up by secreting a bitter substance from underneath its wings, as well as by vomiting a bitter tasting cocktail.

This one individual comes up and takes the Katie did that we present it and kind of waddles off and then goes and kind of plops it in a little stream that was behind us.

We were kind of watching this together and looking at each other like this is a bit

interesting. You know, we haven't seen this before. But then something even more surprising happened. The Magpie dropped the wet kated on the ground and hopped away.

A few minutes later, a juvenile magpie approached, dunked the kated he did once again in the

puddle, and then gobbled it up. The observations were described in the journal Australian field

ornithology. Drinkwater thinks what they saw might be an example of social learning

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