While the early bird indeed "catches the worm," new research from Oxford University reveals that many songbirds scout for food in the morning but save it for a later dinner, BBC News reports, effectively maximizing their chances of survival.
Published in the Royal Society journal Biology of Letters, the authors write that because animals "need to manage the combined risks of predation and starvation in order to survive," songbirds, such as the great tit and the blue tit, store a morning catch to avoid predators during the day, as a full stomach slows birds down and makes them more vulnerable, while keeping themselves from starving overnight.
"Our results are important because they provide a new hypothesis for how animals forage," Damien Farine, lead author of the study, told BBC News. "They suggest that animals integrate the different risks they face into one strategy that can be applied to satisfy both their need to avoid predation and avoid risk."
Oxford researchers tracked the winter foraging movements of five species of songbirds using radio tags and discovered that all of them behaved the same way when it came to saving their food supplies. The experiment involved over 2,000 birds, their tags activated when they landed on hidden feeders in Wytham Woods near Oxford. Over the course of each day, the researchers moved the feeders and noted when the birds landed.
Birds were better at finding the new location of the feeders in the morning, but waited until late afternoon to chow down.
Such behavior, the researchers noted, is especially essential during the winter months when food depletes and birds are at a higher risk of starving to death.
"In the 1970s, when there were almost no sparrowhawks, tits used to be much fatter [in winter], which helped them avoid the risk of starvation," said Farine. "When sparrowhawks returned [in greater numbers], the average body weight of great tits, for example, decreased. However, no one had previously thought to test how birds manage the need to find food so that they can ensure that there will be enough food left at the end of the day in order to put on the necessary amount of fat and survive the long winter nights."
Farine hopes further research can be conducted on the afternoon and evening strategies of songbirds.
