Altruistic Birds?

Australian magpie. Alan, via Flickr. Distributed under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

In the summer of 2019, Dominique Potvin, an animal ecologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, was excited to begin a tracking study on Australian magpies. She and her team had an exciting new technology to test out and plenty of research questions about the birds’ movements and social dynamics.

But the magpies had other ideas. Within minutes of being fitted with tiny, backpack-like tracking devices, the birds began showing evidence of cooperative “rescue” behavior to help one another remove the trackers.

Read the whole story at my Animal Minds blog: Birds Lend a Beak to Outwit Scientists.