Studies show some great
tits are remarkably clever when it comes to solving problems to get at food.
But does this help them in the wild?
BE CAREFUL who you call
a bird brain, you may be paying them a compliment. Some bird species exhibit
remarkable intelligence, among them the great tit, which is a common garden
bird.
The New Caledonian crow
is top of the leader board with its capacity to fashion tools to retrieve food,
but the local great tit doesn’t do too badly when it comes to solving problems.
Dr John Quinn, a specialist in animal personality and cognition, began to study
the bird four years ago while at Oxford University. He and his team caught wild
great tits in a nearby wood and set the birds a simple problem. If they solved
it, they would get at some food.
Now a lecturer in
ecology at University College Cork, Quinn had a particular purpose in mind when
conducting the experiments. “We are trying to understand why we get individual
variations in the birds’ cognitive ability,” he says.
They were also trying to
discover whether it is “better to be brighter” – whether the birds that were
able to solve the puzzle also did better generally, either reproductively or in
terms of survival. “The purpose of our study was simple: to test if it was
better being a problem-solver. That hadn’t been tested in the past. Do they do
better or do all individuals do equally well in the end?
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