It turns out that city birds may be smarter than country birds. Scientists from McGill have found that birds that live in urban habitats have more brains that birds that live in rural ones.
The idea that birds in urban environments are smarter isn't a new one. After all, these animals have to adapt to their surroundings and learn to exploit new resources. Birds in rural environments, in contrast, effectively stick to the same behaviors as they always have.
With that said, in this latest study researchers put that idea to the test. The researchers tested two groups of birds. One of these groups included birds from urbanized areas, while the other group included birds from rural locations. The researchers then gave these birds associative learning tasks in addition to problem-solving tasks. Innovativeness is often considered to be useful in the "real life" of animals in the wild more than associative learning.
More specifically, the researchers gave the birds a series of tasks in which they had to collect seeds from hard-to-reach locations. In one instance, a bird had to pull a stick out of a sideways clear box. Attached to the stick was a container of seeds. The birds first had to pull out the stick to gain access to the container and then open the container in order to be able to eat the seeds.
The researchers also created a simpler task in which the birds had to simply open a "drawer" where seeds happened to be. By opening the tiny drawer, the birds were able to eat the seeds inside.
"We found that not only were birds from urbanized areas better at innovative problem-solving tasks than bullfinches from rural environments, but that surprisingly urban birds also had a better immunity than rural birds," said Jean-Nicolas Audet, first author of the new study. "Since urban birds were better at problem-solving, we expected there would be a trade-off and that the immunity would be lower, just because we assumed you can't be good at everything (in fact, both traits are costly). It seems that in this case, the urban birds have it all."
The findings show that these birds manage to adapt to their environment by learning problem-solving skills. This, in particular, shows how a challenging environment can cause animals to adapt in new ways.
The findings are published in the March 2016 journal Behavioral Ecology.
