City Birds are Smarter than Country Birds

City Birds are Smarter than Country Birds
March 28, 2016 Cure All Pest Control

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Anyone who’s tried to eat lunch in an urban park will be well aware of how bold city birds are when it comes to sneaking a bite, but now new research has confirmed it – living in the city can make you smarter and stronger, if you’re a bird anyway. The research undertaken by McGill University found that city birds have a bigger advantage over their country cousins regarding cognition, behaviour and physiology.

For their feathered experiment, the McGill researchers used 53 native bullfinches captured from both urban and rural areas of Barbados. Jean-Nicolas Audet, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biology, said that the island was an excellent environment in which to carry out the research as it has parts that are very urbanised and those that are mostly untouched. Barbados is also the home of the Bellairs Research Institute, a McGill University facility offering access to a range of tropical terrestrial and marine environments.

At Bellairs the researchers set the bullfinches tests such as opening drawers and problem-solving tasks to access food. It was noted that the birds from the developed areas were able to access food more quickly than their rural counterparts. They were also more innovative and had generally bolder temperaments. Plus they had one another interesting advantage the researchers weren’t expecting.

“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 Audet.

“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. It seems that in this case, the urban birds have it all.”