Dominique Potvin and his colleagues attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study. They found evidence of cooperative "rescue" behaviour to help each other remove the tracking devices. This is
Highlights
- Australian magpies show evidence of cooperative “rescue” behaviour to help each other remove the tracker.
- The only other example of this type of behaviour we could find in the literature is Sechelles warblers helping others in their social group from sticky clusters of Pisonia clusters.
- The study was one of the first of its kind of kind of tracking devices designed to be reusable and easy to download and store data.
- The research paper explains this is a very rare behaviour we’ve never seen in birds, and scientists say it is a rare example of cooperative behaviour rarely seen in humans’ species.
- Backpack-like tracking devices are too big to fit on medium to small birds and tend to be single-use only.