Birds living in urban environments are smarter than birds from rural environments.But, why do city birds have the edge over their country friends? They adapted to their urban environments enabling them to exploit new resources more favourably then their rural counterparts, say a team of McGill University researchers.
In a first-ever study to find clear cognitive differences in birds from urbanised compared to rural areas, the researchers report key differences in problem-solving abilities such as opening drawers to access food, and temperament (bolder) among city birds versus country.
“We found that not only were birds from urbanised areas better at innovative problem-solving tasks than bullfinches from rural environments, but that surprisingly urban birds also had better immunity,” says Jean-Nicolas Audet, of the Department of Biology and first author of the study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology.
“Since urban birds were better at problem-solving, we expected that there would be a trade-off and that the immunity would be lower, just because we assumed that 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.”
Source: www.eurekaalert.com
