I often host a lab where we study the Drinking Bird in its native habitat. But, in case you don’t have a chance to be in my lab and you don’t have your own drinking bird, here’s some video you can analyze. The bird goes through two of its cycles in this clip, and I repeat those cycles at high speed so you can see things in a different way.

A drinking bird is very simple, which makes its actions that much more interesting, I think. What do you notice? What do you wonder about? Can you trace out cause-and-effect rules in the bird and its motion? Can you create a model for how it’s working? In particular, how can something just move (and there are a few different motions in this bird) when it isn’t hooked up to anything else?

Appendix:

In case you need more footage of the drinking bird for longer amounts of time, I have about an hour and 15 minutes of video, both in real time and at 10x speed: