Lucy's yet to use her feet for anything other than climbing, but she seems more of a chewer. She's starting to play with one of her toys now, and sometimes when I give her sunflower seeds, she'll drop the seed altogether and keep chewing on the shell, probably for the sake of chewing. I also attempted to feed her from my palm again, and she started chewing on my ring. She's growing more comfortable, and starting to get curious. I'm probably going to have to make her some toys to keep her from getting too bored.

I didn't think that the preference for using their feet could possibly be in genetics. It's very interesting how that works. I had to look up a few videos of cockatiels doing this, and upon observation, I noticed they don't lift it up as high, or turn their foot sideways like other parrots do. Either they aren't able to, or they just don't quite know how. I see what you mean by them being rather clumsy at it. In some of the videos, the cockatiels dropped their food quite a few times.

I've heard that they're clumsy because their bone structure is different from the birds who are good at it - something in the hip joint I think. They don't have the physical capability to move the same way the more skillful birds too. It's part of the tree feeding versus ground feeding strategy - it takes a lot more acrobatics to reach stuff that's hanging off of thin branches in a tree.

I don't know how much you're into science but here goes. For a long time nobody knew whether cockatiels were cockatoos or grass parakeets because they had characteristics of both. They have a crest like a cockatoo of course, and their breeding habits are the same as cockatoos - the hen gets her own food instead of being fed by the male, and both parents share the incubation and chick-brooding duties. But their body shape, tail length, and feeding habits are more like the grass keets.

But now it's the DNA age and they've been officially declared to be cockatoos. The first study classified them with the black cockatoos, but a second study said they were a separate lineage from the black cockatoos and white cockatoos, and are the only surviving member of the oldest cockatoo lineage.

The 1999 study by Brown & Toft: https://web.archive.org/web/20100611203 ... t_1999.pdf

The 2011 study by White et al: http://tinyurl.com/mvxf2kq

The grass keet characteristics are probably the result of convergent evolution - they have similar characteristics because they have adapted to the same environment in similar ways.