In August 2007, a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball arrived at a bird rescue in Duncan, South Carolina, because his previous owner couldn’t handle him anymore. Nobody was thinking about science. They were thinking about a loud, demanding parrot nobody wanted.
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Then someone put on the Backstreet Boys, and Snowball started bopping his head, kicking up a foot, and throwing his crest around in time with the beat. A shaky home video of that moment ended up on YouTube — and, improbably, in a peer-reviewed neuroscience journal. Snowball didn’t just go viral. He became evidence.
Quick answer
Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo who spontaneously danced to music at a South Carolina bird rescue in 2007; his viral video led neuroscientists Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen to publish a 2009 study in Current Biology showing he could genuinely synchronize movement to a musical beat — making him the first non-human animal scientifically confirmed to do so.
A rescue bird and a Backstreet Boys CD
Snowball, hatched around 1996, had already passed through at least a couple of owners by the time he landed at Bird Lovers Only, a bird shelter run by Irena and Chuck Schulz. His previous owner had noticed him bobbing his head to music and mentioned it when dropping him off, essentially saying: try playing him a CD and see what happens.
Schulz did. Snowball’s reaction — full-body headbanging, foot lifts, and swaying set to the Backstreet Boys’ ‘Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)’ — was captured on video and posted online. Within a week it had racked up hundreds of thousands of views and landed Snowball on television shows like Inside Edition.
The neuroscientist who couldn’t stop watching
The video reached Aniruddh Patel, a neuroscientist then at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, who studies how humans process rhythm and music. Along with colleague John Iversen, Patel wondered whether Snowball was really keeping time — or just flailing around in a way that happened to look rhythmic on camera.
So they tested it properly. Between January and May 2008, they recorded Snowball dancing to versions of a song sped up and slowed down across a range of tempos, then measured whether his movements tracked the changes. They did. The results, published in Current Biology in 2009 under the title ‘Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal,’ showed Snowball adjusting his bobs and steps to match the shifting beat — real beat induction, not coincidence.
The part most people miss
The 2009 study made Snowball famous in labs, not just living rooms, but it wasn’t the end of the research. A 2019 follow-up by Patel’s team catalogued at least 14 distinct dance moves in Snowball’s repertoire — headbangs, body rolls, foot lifts, and combinations of them — performed with no training, no treats, and no obvious reward beyond, it seemed, social engagement with the people watching him. And in 2025, researchers at Charles Sturt University, led by Natasha Lubke, widened the lens further: after analyzing dozens of videos of pet cockatoos plus six birds at Wagga Wagga Zoo in Australia, they documented 30 distinct dance moves across cockatoo species, 17 of them never described before. Some birds danced even without music playing. The upshot is bigger than one clever bird: dancing to a beat may be a real cognitive capacity built into cockatoos generally, not a Snowball-only party trick — and researchers now think music could be used as enrichment to improve the welfare of captive parrots. It’s also worth remembering how Snowball got his start: as a surrendered pet nobody quite knew what to do with. His fame ended up funding the very rescue that took him in, and gave a lot of people their first real look at what happens to parrots — long-lived, complicated, easily outmatched by their owners’ expectations — once the novelty of owning one wears off.
Sources
Aniruddh D. Patel and John R. Iversen, ‘Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal,’ Current Biology (2009).
Tufts Now, ‘Meet Snowball, the Cockatoo with the Dance Moves’ (2019), covering the follow-up study cataloguing Snowball’s 14 dance moves.
Natasha Lubke et al., ‘Dance behaviour in cockatoos: Implications for cognitive processes and welfare,’ PLOS ONE (2025), and Wikipedia’s entry on Snowball (cockatoo) for background on his history at Bird Lovers Only.
Explore more: more true wild animal tales.
Snowball the cockatoo FAQs
What species is Snowball the cockatoo?
Snowball is a sulphur-crested cockatoo (Eleonora subspecies), hatched around 1996.
Did anyone train Snowball to dance?
No. Researchers and his caretaker, Irena Schulz, agree his dancing was spontaneous — he wasn’t taught the moves or rewarded with treats for doing them.
Why was Snowball’s dancing scientifically important?
Before Snowball, no non-human animal had been rigorously shown to synchronize movement to a varying musical tempo — a skill called beat induction. His 2009 test, led by Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen, provided the first solid evidence it exists outside humans.
Can other cockatoos dance too?
Yes. A 2025 study from Charles Sturt University found cockatoos broadly — not just Snowball — perform an array of dance moves, identifying 30 distinct movements across the species studied.
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