A cockatoo: they have so much fun because they are so clever | Helen Sullivan

They know how to get fed by people - like babies, you can't ignore their squawks

In Sydney, sulphur-crested cockatoos play when they fly, ducking under power lines and soaring up again, squawking, charging through gaps in trees, landing only to hang upside down, as though they are mocking the bats. Cockatoos know how to have as much fun as it is possible to have while flying (a lot).

In a painting by William Patrick Roberts of a mother and her children looking at parrots in a shop, the macaws and the black cockatoo perch majestically; at the bottom of the painting a cockatoo fools around on a pole, looking right at you.

Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist.

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