Monk Parakeets Are Highly Social Birds, but They Slowly ‘Test the Waters’ When Making New Friends

The bright green parrots start with low-cost social behaviors—like sitting near each other without touching—when first interacting with unfamiliar birds within their species, possibly to avoid aggressive encounters, new research suggests

Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent

December 2, 2025 2:08 p.m.

The unfamiliar monk parakeets got to know each other slowly before moving on to behaviors like preening, pictured here. Claire O'Connell

Monk parakeets are highly social birds. These bright green parrots live together in large groups, building sprawling, multifamily stick nests that often include chambers for dozens of individuals. They’re socially monogamous, and bonded pairs spend much of their time grooming each other.

When it comes to making new friends, however, these colonial birds prefer to take things slowly. When monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) are introduced to unfamiliar birds, they often “test the waters” first before committing to a new friendship, according to a paper published November 12 in the journal Biology Letters.

Fun fact: Bird apartments

Monk parakeets and their close relatives, cliff parakeets (Myiopsitta luchsi), are the only parrot species known to hunker down with several birds in separate chambers within a single nest structure. Some structures can hold more than 200 nests. The housing strategy may help the birds survive cold winters.

This behavior is intuitive, researchers behind the new work say, and it closely mirrors how many humans navigate new relationships as well.

“The birds need to make decisions about who they are going to form relationships with and when, and that process could have important consequences for their survival and reproduction,” Claire O’Connell, a study co-author and behavioral ecologist at the University of Cincinnati, tells Forbes via email*.*

For the study, O’Connell and her colleagues captured 22 wild parakeets—14 males and 8 females—from four different locations. After a quarantine period, the birds were brought together in an outdoor flight pen in Gainesville, Florida.

Over the course of 22 days in April 2021, the scientists spent more than 130 hours observing the parrots, making note of how the birds shared space and interacted with each other. They recorded how often strangers approached one another, as well as how close they got without touching. They also documented friendly behaviors like shoulder contact, feather grooming and beak touching.

Some clear patterns emerged when the researchers analyzed the data. Parakeets behaved more tentatively around strangers than they did with birds they already knew. They approached unknown birds more slowly and cautiously than they did familiar ones, spending time near each other before actually touching. Eventually, some strangers got close enough to perch shoulder to shoulder, preen each other, touch beaks, share food or even mate.

Social bonds are important for monk parakeets, but initial interactions between strangers can also be risky. Nina Conklin

Researchers suspect this guarded behavior, a strategy they refer to as “testing the waters,” helps the parrots avoid potentially dangerous confrontations, which could result in aggression or injury. Developing and maintaining strong social bonds is important for the birds, but initial interactions between strangers can also be risky.

“We often observe what we call ‘quarreling,’ which may occur if a bird’s attempt to groom another bird’s feathers is not well received,” O’Connell says in a statement. “Quarreling is a mild type of aggression, and it may deter the bird from trying to groom them.”

Vampire bats—another highly social species—behave similarly when they encounter strangers. A 2020 study published in the journal Current Biology details how unfamiliar vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) get to know each other slowly, starting with grooming before moving on to sharing food.

Researchers say the monk parakeet and vampire bat findings align with the “raising the stakes” strategy. Under this idea, strangers begin with low-cost social behaviors and, if those gestures are reciprocated, gradually move to higher-cost ones. This “tit-for-tat” strategy, proposed in 1998, may help unfamiliar individuals manage risk and build trust as they form new relationships.

“It’s a powerful strategy because it means you can escalate into a trusting relationship, but you also don’t lose out too much if you meet an uncooperative individual,” Tom Sherratt, a biologist at Carleton University in Canada who helped develop the idea, told National Geographic’s Mary Bates in 2020 when the vampire bat study came out.

Researchers can relatively easily test whether humans use the strategy, but it’s more difficult to explore among animals. So, aside from monk parakeets and vampire bats, scientists don’t know how common this strategy is among nonhuman social species. Additional research is needed, the study authors write, but they suspect that “testing the waters” is fairly widespread.

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