[visualise]

My 7 year old tiel has suddenly realised the mirror is just a mirror.
He spent years flirting with the bird in the mirror when I held a mirror up to him.

This year I started using a new name for my tiel, which he responded to better than his old name and has more affinity for.

The past month or two I said his new nickname while holding up the mirror to him. He then started pecking at the frame around the mirror and looking behind the mirror rather than looking at the reflection itself.

Ever since, he no longer flirts or gets excited by the reflection when I hold up the mirror to him. He pecks the frame and peers around the mirror.

If I try to force him to look, he will briefly - but he then gives it a cheeky "go away" peck. He then looks away shyly with a sideways posture.

If I hold up the mirror to us, with him on my shoulder and my face taking up most the mirror's reflection, he pecks my face after briefly looking at me & him in the mirror.

Seems I broke the spell by saying his name while he looked into the mirror? I think something just "clicked" inside his mind and now he knows.

I feel kinda bad I ruined his fun and he can't flirt with a strange bird in the mirror anymore!

Does anybody else have a mirror smart teal like this?

He also does other smart things as he got older. He sings while taking lids off cups and throws them onto the floor. He bounces around remote controls while singing then throws them over the desk ledge, he then jumps down once it's in pieces on the box below the desk and throws the individual pieces off the box again.
He also wrestles cardboard boxes, pretending he's in a fight with them while making horrid screeching noises like he's being hurt, before tossing them over the ledge.
I tell you no lie, he even grabbed onto one of these cardboard boxes once with his claws and instead of pushing it over the edge after wrestling it, he flew it into the ground (swooping down) and let go of it 1 foot above the ground before swooping back up. I could not believe it myself. Seems he has some DNA of a predator bird inside? It only happened once though.

 

[visualise]

How rude nobody has replied about this.
Anyway, I suppose the point is the 1970's mirror test is ill-performed psychobabble and the people who performed these tests probably didn't have bonds with their animals or the ability to train or educate them. They must have just plonked wild animals in front of mirrors without trying to teach them the mirror = them.
Cockatiels are self-aware! At least mine is.. and he is not particularly bright either. He's a male pearl who probably has very slightly below average intelligence due to inbreeding for that variety. I.e. he doesn't ever talk, and has a small song repertoire. So if my tiel can learn self-awareness, I'm sure other tiels can too.

How does my tiel feel about being self-aware? DEPRESSED 😀
After learning the mirror is him and waving the mirror in front of him for a minute or two, he looks sad and depressed on his perch after seeing himself. I don't know why! He is beautiful

This is not to suggest though that any wild cockatiel are self-aware. Their lives in the wild are so simple and fast-paced in comparison. But I think in captivity we can extract some further intelligence out of them with lots of stimulation and understanding

Interestingly while wild eurasian magpies have passed the mirror test without training, pigeons HAVE passed it but only with training from humans.

So I suppose cockatiel intelligence can be equated to that of a pigeon (no surprise there).

Here is another report of cockatiel self-awareness for anybody interested which is even more supportive than my experience: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalBehavior/comments/l4vacm