Wild birds prioritise their mates over food, study finds

Wild birds will sacrifice access to food in order to stay close to their partner over the winter, a team of UK scientists claim.

In a novel experiment, researchers from the Oxford University’s Department of Zoology found that mated pairs of great tits chose to prioritise their relationships over sustenance. The team’s findings, published in the journal Current Biology, show the importance of social relationships for wild birds, even when pursuing those relationships appears to be detrimental.

“The choice to stay close to their partner over accessing food demonstrates how an individual bird’s decisions in the short term, which might appear sub-optimal, can actually be shaped around gaining the long-term benefits of maintaining their key relationships. For instance, great tits require a partner to be able to reproduce and raise their chicks,” says Josh Firth, the study’s lead researcher.

Their study shows that even in wild animals, an individual animal’s behaviour can be governed by aiming to accommodate the needs of those they are socially attached to, Firth adds.

The research team conducted their experiment at Oxford University’s Wytham Woods site to the west of Oxford. They used automated feeding stations with the ability to decide which individual birds could and could not access the food inside. Birds were allowed access based on radio frequency identification tags that were linked to the feeding stations.

In the experiment, mated pairs of birds were unable to access the same feeding stations. This means that the male birds could only access the feeding stations that the female could not, and vice versa. The researchers found that the birds spent significantly more time at feeders they could not access because their mate was there.

As a result, the birds also end up associating with their partners’ flock-mates, even if they wouldn’t usually associate with these individuals, Firth says. “This shows how the company an individual bird keeps may depend on their partner’s preferences as well as their own,” he adds.

Over time, the birds also learned to “scrounge” from the feeders they were not allowed to access, by taking advantage of the fact the feeders remained unlocked for two seconds after recognising a bird’s identification tag. According to the researchers, a relatively large amount of this scrounging was enabled by the bird’s own partner unlocking the feeding station, suggesting it may be a cooperative strategy.

Wild birds are not the only ones to prioritise their mates over food. In a November 2014 study, which also appeared in Current Biology, showed that male nematode worms suppress their ability to locate food in order to search for a mate.

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