The Cornish Jackdaw Project began in Autumn 2012, as part of our Project Leader Alex Thornton’s Fellowship that aimed to understand the evolution of animal intelligence. Our research currently focusses on the following areas:
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The co-evolution of social relationships and cognition
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The effects of social learning on individual and group behaviour
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Collective behaviour in heterogeneous groups
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The causes and consequences of individual variation in cognitive ability
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Cognitive and behavioural responses to environmental change
People often think that the ‘super-smart’ animals of the world are creatures that they might never cross paths with, be it because they are exotic and rare such as the great apes, elephants, and many parrots, or because they come from another environment entirely, as is the case with the whales and dolphins. There are some birds that have exceptional cognitive abilities that pass through your garden on a daily basis, however, and these are the members of the crow family. Corvids have brains that are equivalent in terms of their body size to those of chimpanzees, and captive studies over recent decades have found them to have quite exceptional cognitive abilities. Why is it though, that some animals have evolved to be brainy, while others have not?
To start unpicking questions such as this we need to leave the lab and start studying animals in their natural environment. Jackdaws are an ideal species to start addressing such questions, because they are highly intelligent, social, and inquisitive member of the corvid family. They also have the added bonus that they like to new colonially and readily use nest boxes. This is vital to our research, for if you want to understand why something evolves, you need to be able to measure the units of currency that evolution trades in – the passage of genes from a parent to future generation. An animal might display the most incredible behaviour or trait, but if it must pass its genes on to subsequent generations if such features are to persist. Using nest boxes, we can easily follow every aspect of the reproduction of the birds in exceptional detail – from the date that the first egg is laid to the day that the last chick leaves the nest, as well as regularly weighing the chicks to chart their growth. Using nest box cameras we can also observe what the birds get up to when we are not around.
Across our four colonies near the Cornish towns of Penryn, Stithians, and Mawnan we have 120 nest boxes, and by the end of 2022 we have fitted over 3000 jackdaws with unique colour ring combinations that allow us to identify different individuals in the field. Almost all of the birds also carry a transponder inside one of their rings that works like contactless card payment – allowing us to record visits to feeders, nest boxes, or anywhere else that we fit an antennae! This allows us to do things such as characterise the social networks of the birds in our population, as well as allowing us to potentially programme field equipment to behave differently depending on the identity and experience of the individual interacting with it. Through manipulations like this we can start to explore how the birds might adjust their social networks and social tolerance as the value of different associations changes, as well as exploring the impact that their strong pair bonds have on their access to socio-cultural information.
Our a final avenue of research that has been exploring the effect of jackdaws’ strong pair bonds on the movement dynamics of their flocks. Jackdaws are an unusual bird in many regards, in that they stick with their partner for life, and seldom leave each other’s side. This contrasts with birds such as starling flocks and fish schools, where much of our understanding of collective behaviour comes from, as in these groups the individuals are generally considered to be identical and interchangeable. If you cast your eyes to the sky as a flock passes over head you will probably be able to pick out the pairs, but this poses an intriguing question – if the bird on your right is the love of your life, but you don’t know the one on your left from Adam, how does this influence how the group moves as a whole, especially in situations of danger? Even more complexity comes in winter, when jackdaws and rooks travel together to their winter roost sites, meaning that the flock contains various species and social substructure. Through our collaboration with physicists and robotocists from Standford and Simon Fraser Universities, we hope to increase our understanding of these subjects in the near future.
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