Ask A Birder: Do birds have a favorite foot?

The useful part

Once, when working for several weeks on a particularly boring consulting project, I tried to learn to use the computer mouse exclusively with my left hand. Alas, this turned out to be much more difficult than preparing the content for my required quota of PowerPoint slides. Of course, on the football field, I am even more hopeless with my left foot than with my right one.

How it works

• How about birds?One might think that the equivalent of handedness in birds would be a preference for one wing over the other.
• However, research has found very little preference for one wing over the other.
• Many of them consistently favor one foot for holding food – and to humans (of which 90% are right-handed), some species show a strong preference for their left foot on the population level (source).
• The preferred explanation is that flight requires highly symmetrical movements, which does not favor a preferred wing (a bit like "one hand clapping", I guess).
• Apparently, like humans, birds have two brain hemispheres with different specializations (source).

What to take from it

As each hemisphere controls primarily the opposite side of the body, this results in a preference for one f...

Details worth keeping

It is quite different for feet, at least in several parrot species.