Songbirds Teach Each Other Tricks

In the UK for years, milk came in bottles with foil caps. Great Tits, a common songbird, learned how to peck through the foil. The skill spread. But how? Researchers trained Great Tits in different ways of opening a box and re-released them. Knowledge of how to open the box spread rapidly, with most birds copying the trained bird in their group. In a follow-up study, the researchers made one method of opening the box more effective. Many birds quickly switched to the better method, suggesting the tits can stand up to peer pressure if they see there’s a better way of doing things.

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Songbirds Teach Each Other Tricks

Adapted from a script by Gordon Orians

This is BirdNote.

[Great Tit song ML36198]

In the UK for years, milk was delivered to your front door in bottles with foil caps. Great Tits, a common songbird in the UK, learned how to peck through the foil to get at the cream. The skill spread. But how?

To find out, researchers launched a series of experiments. Males from different subpopulations were captured, trained in one of two different, but equally effective, ways of opening a box to get food, and re-released into the wild.

Knowledge of how to open the box spread rapidly within 20 days, and most of the birds that learned the trick did it the same way the trained bird in their group did. Clearly, they learned how to open the food box by observing others that already knew how to do it.

[Great Tit song ML36198]

What's more, when birds moved between different cultures, they learned the prevailing way to open the box in their new community. Social conformity is a powerful force — for birds as well as people.

But when the researchers did a follow-up experiment and changed one method of opening the box to be more effective, nearly half of the birds switched to the more effective method in just 14 days. It seems that Great Tits can stand up to peer pressure if they see there’s a better way of doing things!

For BirdNote, I'm Michael Stein.
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Senior Producer: Mark Bramhill
Producer: Sam Johnson
Content Director: Jonese Franklin

Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Great Tit ML 36198 recorded by A. Vandenburg.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote May 2022 Narrator: Michael Stein

ID# GTIT-01b-2022-05-24 GTIT-01b

Reference: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13998
PDF: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lucy-Aplin/publication/269189563_E…
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7830