Birds have learned to READ!?!?!

[Unorthodox]

 


http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/birds-observe-the-speed-limit-when-it-comes-to-keeping-away-from-cars-study-1.1420013

VANCOUVER -- It appears birds observe the speed limit -- even if drivers don't.

A new study by two Quebec researchers has found that birds flee from the path of an oncoming vehicle based on the posted speed limit, and not the actual speed of the vehicle.

Birds are known to adapt, said Pierre Legagneux, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski.

Urban birds adjust their song frequencies to account for noise pollution and they tolerate closer contact with humans compared to their rural cousins.

Driving back and forth from his home to his laboratory while studying in western France, Legagneux wondered what triggered birds to get out of the way.

"I was doing that just because I had to do something while driving, and I found something to do was record birds flying in front of my vehicle," he said.

"I had no expectations at all. Just doing that was better than doing nothing -- at the beginning."

Legagneux and colleague Simon Ducatez, from McGill University, calculated the distance at which their feathered friends would take off with a vehicle bearing down.

"I expected to find that birds of course would react to my own vehicle... but I found it was not the case at all. We found that birds were reacting to the average speed of the road," he said.

The study captured 25 species in flight. They looked at reaction distances for all species, and for the three most prevalent and the results were similar.

In an article published today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, they said the birds appear to have habituated to the local speed limit as one of the features of the landscape, like the risk of predators.

They believe they're also responding to "artificial selection," after less cautious birds were eliminated.

"Perhaps risk-prone individuals may have been killed, and only the shy individuals (have survived)," Legagneux said.

The average distance birds allowed between themselves and the approaching vehicle before initiating flight was shorter in spring and summer than in fall and winter, which led them to believe that naive, juvenile birds present in those early seasons were no longer around come fall.

The discovery could help conservation efforts, Legagneaux said.

"If you have an especially vulnerable species in one area, and you want to protect them... then I would suggest to make sure the speed limit is not changing all the time, and not exceeded by any driver," he said.



Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/birds-observe-the-speed-limit-when-it-comes-to-keeping-away-from-cars-study-1.1420013#ixzz2ccnhsvS2

(yeah, not really reading, just getting used to how fast cars are SUPPOSED to go) 

[Kirov]

Still sounds like April Fool's.  Is CTV News a reliable source? Actually I'd like to read more about those birds. An interesting instance of adaptation.

[Unorthodox]

It's Canada, of course it's not reliable.     

[Unorthodox]

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/21/speeding-towards-birds-in-a-car-for-science/

In the winter of 2006, Pierre Legagneux started measuring when birds would fly away from him, as he sped towards them in his white Peugeot. This wasn’t an official part of his research; he was just bored. After a recent move, his mornings of cycling past bucolic villages and forests had been replaced by long, tedious drives. “I found it very boring so I found something to do while driving,“ he says. “I started recording birds flying away in front of my car.”

Legagneux drove down roads with speed limits of 20, 50, 90 or 110 kilometres per hour, and either stuck exactly to those speeds or deliberately drove under or over them. Every time he saw a bird on the road—usually a crow, blackbird or pigeon*—he started a stopwatch when it flew away and stopped it when the car passed over the point where the bird had been. By multiplying the car’s speed by the time on the stopwatch, he could work out how far away he was from the bird when it took off—the “flight initiation distance”.

One year and 134 measurements later, Legagneux clearly showed that birds flee from incoming traffic at greater distances on roads with higher speed limits. On a 110 km/h road, they’d be airborne when the Peugeot was 75 metres away. On a 20 km/h road, they’d wait till the car was less than 10 metres away before taking off.

That’s fairly predictable. But more surprisingly, Legagneux also found that the birds didn’t react to the actual speed of his car. Their flight initiation distance depended on the speed limit of the road, but not on the speed of the incoming traffic.

Other factors were important too. The birds allowed the car to get closer if they were smaller (and presumably more agile) or during the autumn and winter (when newborn chicks have had a few seasons to get accustomed to roadside perils). But regardless, the main results still held even after Legagneux accounted for the season, the weight of the birds, their location on the road, and their evolutionary relationships.

We know that birds can inherit risk-taking behaviour from their peers, so faster roads could select for more cautious birds. Indeed, urban birds eventually evolve longer flight initiation distances than rural ones, and some swallows that nest near roads have evolved shorter wings and tighter turns.  But Legagneux doesn’t think that the birds in his study were actually adapting to the different roads, since they’re likely to experience a variety of speed limits.

Instead, they’ve probably come to associate different stretches of road with different risks of collision, and adjusted their behaviour accordingly. This may explain why birds with larger territories are more vulnerable to cars—they might not be able to tailor their activities to local roads.

* No chickens…

Reference: Legagneux & Ducatez. 2013. European birds adjust their flight initiation distance to road speed limits. Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0417

[Kirov]

Cool, thanks for the post and the links.