For a long time cognition in birds was considered to be limited to simple forms of learning by „bird brains“. This opinion about birds started to change fundamentally during the last decade of research, showing that birds are curios and innovative animals. Our research aims at investigating perceptual, physical and social cognition in kea. Thereby we have a strong focus on the interplay between these domains and explorative behaviour and environmental condition. These questions target fundamental issues of cognition such as how animals acquire knowledge, what they know about causality and whether they are able to reason by analogy. The kea’s high competences in the social and physical domain make them also interesting to study the interrelation of social and individual learning, adopting or innovating strategies.