Residents of Lorne, on Victoria's scenic Great Ocean Road, have been locked in a battle of wits for years now.They've been fighting skirmishes with a large flock of increasingly intelligent sulphur-crested cockatoos that love lifting the lids of the town's wheelie bins and spreading rubbish on the ground."When holiday-makers and Airbnbs, etc, leave on a Sunday, they put the bin out, overfill it, and the cockies just throw rubbish all over the road," says Allan Walls from the Lorne and District Men's Shed.The birds have grown so dexterous that they can now lift the lids on bins that aren't overfilled, and they have shared that knowledge with other birds in their flock. "It's terrible (ABC News: Jonathon Kendall)"The theory is you can't lift what you're standing on … and in the five years we've had them out testing them there hasn't been a failure that I'm aware of," Mr Walls says.The design has been so successful that Surf Coast Shire has spent $50,000 to buy and install 500 of the aprons on Lorne residents' bins for free. That figure includes "the significant upfront investment required to establish manufacturing", according to the council."This investment means future purchases of additional bin aprons will be more cost-effective," the council says.The council estimates it has spent nearly $500,000 on various devices to keep cockatoos out of bins in the past 15 years, as well as education campaigns encouraging people not to feed them.In 2021, the council tried to limit the amount of time bins were left out