Food Or Love? Birds Choose Love

Researchers from Oxford University observed that the great tit or Parus major – a widespread and common species throughout Europe and Middle East, part of North America and in any type of woodland- would rather starve than be separated from their mates.

A few birds will sacrifice food if it means they will get to spend the winter by their partner’s side, new research suggests. These stations can track the behavior of birds and can decide which individual bird could access and not access the food inside.

The research reflects how important love is in a relationship at least in bird’s life.

An experiment was carried out in which the researchers used automated feeding stations to track the eating habits of these birds. This would indicate that an individual bird’s decisions may appear sub-optimal for a short time frame but could actually be oriented towards gaining the long term benefits of maintaining their vital relationships with their mates.

In fact, smarter couples figured out how to trick the feeding machine’s system. A group of scientists discovered that pairs of nice tits who’ve already mated will truly select their relationship over a meal.

And, over time, the pairs may even have learned to cooperate to allow each other to scrounge from off-limits feeding stations. “For instance, great tits require a partner to be able to reproduce and raise their chicks”, explains lead study author Josh Firth. Therefore, even in wild animals, an individual’s behaviour can be governed by aiming to accommodate the needs of those they are socially attached to. If a male could eat at one station, the female could not, and vise versa.

Staying with their partners, the birds also associated more with their partners’ flock-mates, noted Firth in the release: “Because these birds choose to stay with their partners, they also end up associating with their partners’ flock-mates, even if they wouldn’t usually associate with these individuals. This exhibits how the corporate a person chicken retains could depend upon their accomplice’s preferences in addition to their very own”. The machines were rigged so that one of the two mated birds will not be able to feed off the same machine as their partner.

The birds also innovated their own access to a few of the stations; they found that a feeder accessible by a partner would stay unlocked for two seconds after it opened for a bird’s ID tag.