Studies on advanced forms of tool use in birds have mainly been concentrated on corvids. In this study, captive kea, a neophilic New Zealand parrot species, produced different orders of spatial object relationships in a tube-lifting/object-inserting paradigm. Hence, we found that kea, which are neither natural tool users nor nest builders, could readily solve a second-order tool use task. They also learned to produce highly complicated means-means-end sequences in a short period of time. (C) 2010 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.