Vorausschauende Vögel

Wer hätte das gedacht. Vögel planen ihr Frühstück schon am Abend vorher. Kommt bei mir so gut wie nie vor, es sei denn es zählt auch, wenn man versucht, immer Milch für den Frühstückskaffee im Haus zu haben.

They might not pay into savings accounts or keep diaries, but western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) can anticipate and plan for the future, research published in Nature this week shows.

What the birds do in the evening depends on how they might feel the next morning. They can anticipate, for example, how much food, and of what type, will be available in different locations, and store away the right amount, in the right place, for breakfast.

[...]

The birds were put in cages that were divided into three parts. In the evening they were kept in the middle section, and fed powdered pine nuts that they couldn't store. In the morning, they were kept either in the 'breakfast room', where they were given food, or went hungry in the 'no-breakfast room'.

After getting used to this set-up, the jays were given whole pine nuts in the evening, which they could bury in trays of sand. The jays put three times as many in the no-breakfast room than in the breakfast room, so that they wouldn't go hungry in the morning.

In einem anderen Experiment haben sie in den beiden "Frühstücksräume" unterschiedliche Futtersorten bereitgestellt, woraufhin die Scrub-jays (Westlicher Buschhäher) am Abend vorher ihr Futter so verteilt haben, dass sie am nächsten Morgen auf jeden Fall beide Sorten hatten. Auch noch wählerisch. Und nicht nur das:

Jays also seem to be able to imagine others' mental states. In 2001, Clayton's group showed that jays that have stolen food from others are more careful about hiding their own food. We shouldn't assume, says Clayton, that such mental skills will be confined to our close relatives, such as chimpanzees.

Ganz schön clever.

Others agree that the cognitive abilities of birds may be under-rated. "It's not a surprise to me," says Thomas Zentall of the University of Kentucky in Lexington, who studies cognition in animals. "There's been a bias against birds because they have small brains."

Ok, mag sein, dass das tatsächlich nur ein Vorurteil ist, aber um ich von meiner Überzeugung abzubringen, dass Tauben wirklich dämliche Vögel sind, reicht eine einzige Untersuchung einfach nicht aus...

MfG,

JLT

Quelle: news@nature
Artikel: Planning for the future by western scrub-jays; C. R. Raby, D. M. Alexis, A. Dickinson and N. S. Clayton, Nature 445, 919-921 (22 February 2007)