̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - corvid

Madingley aviaries saved from closure

cjb250 — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 11:00:05 +0000

We are very grateful to everyone who has contributed to helping the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge secure the future of this important research facility. We welcome any further donations to help us keep the facility open beyond this period.

̽��ֱ��aviaries have been the location of exceptional research led by Professor Nicky Clayton FRS that has transformed our understanding of the behaviour and intelligence of these bird species.

For more information on how you can support the aviaries, please visit our Clayton Corvid Lab fundraising page.

We are delighted to announce that due to a number of generous donations from both members of the public and the scientific community, together with support from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, we are able to keep the corvid aviaries at Madingley open for a further five years.

Nick Saffell ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge)

Jays at Madingley

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Attribution

Jays: the birds that can talk like humans

amb206 — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 11:12:00 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

Jays are corvids – members of the crow family. ̽��ֱ��jays we see in Britain are Eurasian jays. With their pinkish plumage, and characteristic flash of blue, they will be familiar to many people as woodland birds that are increasingly seen in gardens, even in cities.

Professor Nicky Clayton (Department of Psychology) has carried out pioneering research into the thinking power of corvids. Her observations have revealed these crows to be extremely clever. In Aesop’s Fables, the wise old crow drops pebbles into a pitcher of water to raise the level and allow her to drink. Clayton’s work has revealed that real-life crows can, if they need to, use pebbles in just this way.

Corvids, including jays, cache (hide) food so that they can retrieve it later. They know who’s watching them and they also show the ability to plan ahead. Perhaps even more remarkably, corvids share their food. Male corvids even show the ability to understand what foods females prefer and will bring their mates tasty titbits.

We don’t think of corvids as song birds but current research is just beginning to reveal that they are skilled mimics, able to reproduce familiar sounds. As the accompanying film shows, a jay called Romero enjoys mimicking Clayton when she talks to him in one of the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� aviaries where she and colleagues are transforming our understanding of bird cognition.

These are just a few of the reasons that Clayton describes jays and other members of the crow family as ‘feathered apes’ – a term that challenges the ways we think about intelligence in the animal kingdom.

Clayton has been fascinated by birds ever since, as a young girl, she watched them in her garden. Her research into bird cognition has always run in parallel with her passion for dance. “It was the movements of birds that first drew me to them,” she says. “I wanted to know what they were doing, how they move and how they think.”

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: K is for a bird that has biologists, physicists and materials scientists working together to unravel the secrets behind its spectacular colour effects.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Eurasian jays (Ljerka Ostojic).

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, J is for Jay – a surprisingly clever corvid with the ability to mimic human voices and much more.

Jay

Ljerka Ostojic

Eurasian jay

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Male Eurasian jays know that their female partners’ desires can differ from their own

jfp40 — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 10:52:41 +0000

Knowing what another person wants is not a trivial issue, particularly when the other’s desires are different from our own. ̽��ֱ��ability to disengage from our own desire to cater to someone else’s wishes is thought to be a unique feature of human cognition.

New research challenges this assumption. Despite wanting something different to eat, male Eurasian jays can disengage from their own current desire in order to feed the female what she wants even when her desires are different to his. ̽��ֱ��study, which was funded by the BBSRC, is published today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

“We found that males could respond to the female’s desire even when their own desire was conflicting. That said, the males were also partially biased by what they wanted – a bias similar to one commonly found in human children and adults,” said Dr Ljerka Ostojić, who led the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge study.

For the study, nine male-female pairs of Eurasian jays (a member of the Corvid family) from two colonies were tested during the breeding season – the only time when jays share food. To manipulate what food the males and the females desired, the researchers used a phenomenon termed ‘specific satiety’ – after eating a particular food item to satiety, jays prefer to eat a novel food item that they are not currently sated on.

Once a day the females and males were placed in adjacent compartments with a mesh window in between. ̽��ֱ��male was then pre-fed either wax moth larvae or mealworm beetle larvae – both favourite treats for jays - until he did not want more. At the same time, the female’s desire was manipulated by giving her the same food as the male (meaning that their desires were matching), a different food from the male (meaning that their desires were conflicting), or her usual diet (meaning that the female’s desire was neutral towards the two types of larvae).

During the pre-feeding, the male had visual access to the female and saw her eat. At the end of pre-feeding, all food was removed. ̽��ֱ��males were then given 20 choices between a single wax moth larva and a mealworm beetle larva which they could either eat, cache (hide for later) or give to the female.

Not surprisingly, when the male and female birds’ preferences were the same, the male fed the female the food desired by both. However, when the female’s desire differed from the male’s, then he took his partner’s wishes into account, often feeding her the food that she desired. This ability to ascribe to another individual an internal life like one’s own and at the same time understand that the other’s internal, psychological states might differ from one’s own is called state-attribution.

Professor Nicky Clayton, whose Comparative Cognition lab at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Psychology conducted the study, said: “As humans, we ‘put ourselves into someone else’s shoes’ in order to respond to what the other person wants. Although we are biased by our own current desires, we can inhibit these to put the wants and desires of another before our own. ̽��ֱ��current findings show that the jays can also do this. So what this research suggests is that a common mechanism might underlie ‘desire-state attribution’ in humans and jays.”

New research shows that male jays are able to disengage from their own current desires to feed their female partner food that she wants.

We found that males could respond to the female’s desire even when their own desire was conflicting.

Dr Ljerka Ostojić

Male Eurasian jay

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̽��ֱ��eyes have it

jfp40 — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:01:00 +0000

While what humans do with their eyes has been well studied, we know almost nothing about whether birds communicate with members of the same species with their eyes.

̽��ֱ��new study, published today in Biology Letters, shows that jackdaw eyes are used as a warning signal to successfully deter competitors from coming near their nest boxes.

Gabrielle Davidson of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who led the study, said: “Jackdaw eyes are very unusual. Unlike their close relatives, the rooks and crows – which have very dark eyes – jackdaw eyes are almost white and their striking pale irises are very conspicuous against their dark feathers.”

While most birds have black or dark brown eyes, bright eyes are not unknown in the avian world, and around 10% of passerines (perching birds) have coloured irises. ̽��ֱ��question Davidson wanted to answer was do jackdaws use their bright eyes to communicate with fellow jackdaws?

Just before the spring breeding season arrived last year, Davidson installed one of four different pictures in 100 jackdaw nest boxes on the outskirts of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��pictures were either black (the control), a pair of jackdaw eyes, a pair of jackdaw eyes in a jackdaw’s face, or a jackdaw’s face with a pair of black rook eyes. She then filmed the effect the different pictures had on the birds’ behaviour.

“Jackdaws are unique among the crow family in that they nest in cavities in trees. These hollows are natural – the birds cannot excavate their own nest cavities as some woodpeckers do – so they have to compete for a limited resource. And because jackdaws nest in close proximity to each other, they fight a lot to gain the best nesting sites,” she explained. Often what initiates these fights are jackdaws approaching nest boxes that are not their own.

After analysing 40 videos of jackdaws peeking into each other’s nest boxes, she found that compared with the other nest boxes, those that contained the picture of a jackdaw with its bright eyes was much more likely to deter the birds from landing on it, and that the birds spent less time near such a nest box.

Davidson’s study is the first to show the eyes being used as a means of communication between members of the same species outside primates.

“Before now we knew very little about why some birds have brightly coloured eyes. In jackdaws, the pale eyes may function to improve their ability to defend their nest and chicks from competitors. It also raises the question of whether this is unique to jackdaws, or if other cavity nesting birds also use their eyes in a similar way,” she added.

̽��ֱ��field research took place at the Cambridge Jackdaw Project, which was established by Dr Alex Thornton of the ̽��ֱ�� of Exeter.

To see the research in action, view video below:

Researchers in Cambridge and Exeter have discovered that jackdaws use their eyes to communicate with each other – the first time this has been shown in non-primates.

Unlike their close relatives, rooks and crows, jackdaw eyes are almost white and their striking pale irises are very conspicuous against their dark feathers.

Gabrielle Davidson

Richard Woods. Homepage banner credit: Вых Пыхманн

Jackdaw

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Clever crows and dancing duets

bjb42 — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Nicky Clayton has always been fascinated by birds – by their glamour and elegance, their movement and rituals, their melodies and labours. This abiding passion has taken her from studying birdsong in zebra finches to observing complex feats of cognition in members of the corvid (crow) family, which includes scrub-jays, British jays, ravens and crows. Moving from the ̽��ֱ�� of California Davis to Cambridge’s Department of Experimental Psychology in 2000 with her colony of scrub-jays, she embarked on a series of experiments with colleague Professor Tony Dickinson that was to break new ground in comparative cognition. Their inventive experiments have shown that birds hide (or cache) food, remember where to recover it from at a later date, and even steal it from each other. Not only this, but by remembering past events (such as whether or not they would find breakfast in a certain room in the morning), the birds could take action for their future (by moving breakfast into the empty room the night before).

̽��ֱ��widely held view had been that animals can learn things through experience but not through memory; this ability to mentally travel back through time – so-called episodic memory – was thought to be something unique to the human race. For the first time ever, these experiments showed that humans are not alone in being able to remember a past experience in terms of what happened, where and when.

Nicky Clayton’s research has already branched out to cognitive studies comparing corvids with great apes through a collaborative project with her husband, Dr Nathan Emery (Queen Mary, ̽��ֱ�� of London). She is now also embarking on similar studies in young children with Dr Jim Russell in the Department of Experimental Psychology. These incredibly productive collaborations hold great promise for our future understanding of the workings of the brain in animals and humans.

What would others be surprised to learn about you?

A large part of my life is spent dancing – ballet, jazz, and particularly Latin dance like salsa and tango. Of course birds dance too: I have a favourite video clip that I show my students of the dance of the Swallow-tailed Manakin – it’s the avian equivalent of tango, and not surprisingly therefore they are found in Argentina! Two males perform a duet, a fabulous, showy double-act in which they display their beautiful plumage and synchronised movements. ̽��ֱ��males spend 90% of their time for nine months of the year dancing – a pretty intense avian dance school. This example encapsulates why I love dance: the elegance of movement, the colours, form, intensity and dedication – it strikes the core of my soul.

Who or what inspires you?

What inspires me is the curiosity and creativity of science, and the social and serendipitous meetings between people that lead on to discoveries. My academic hero is the late Bill Thorpe, Professor of Animal Ethology and founder of Cambridge’s Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour. He was an incredibly wise man and in many ways ahead of his time: he suggested that because bird brains are structurally different from the classic mammalian structure people shouldn’t assume that they are creatures of instinct. We now know of course that birds have quite impressive cognitive abilities.

Have you ever had a Eureka moment?

I suppose when Tony Dickinson and I first met – at the International Comparative Psychology meeting in Montreal in 1996 – and he said animals don’t need episodic memory. That got us talking and we began asking questions in a way that nobody else had been doing before. Out of that developed a wonderfully fruitful collaboration, with the result that four years later I moved here and we have been collaborating ever since.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

Lord Krebs of Wytham, whom I worked with in Oxford, always emphasised the importance of balance in your life. His maxim was ‘healthy minds need healthy bodies’.

If you could wake up tomorrow with a new skill, what would it be?

I’d like to be able to dance flamenco. And I’d like to be reincarnated as a scrub-jay – imagine what it must be like to experience being part of this clever family of birds and find out what they really are thinking!

What motivates you to go to work each day?

That’s really easy: I love what I do. I love my days spent in research, in teaching undergraduates and graduates, in running a wonderfully supportive family-style lab, and last but by no means least, these long-term collaborations with my two best friends – Nathan, who is my husband and soulmate, and dear Tony. And I love releasing steam by dancing tango and salsa.

What is your favourite research tool?

My eyes and ears. For so much of the work I do what’s essential is detailed observation – looking and listening. It’s also important for dancing – being a good observer and a good listener helps you to copy the nuances of the rhythms.

Nicky Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Experimental Psychology, has thrown the doors wide open on animal cognition. Where once the idea would have been dismissed that animals can re-experience the past and plan for the future, her imaginative studies have shown this inherent cleverness in crows.

What inspires me is the curiosity and creativity of science, and the social and serendipitous meetings between people that lead on to discoveries.

Professor Nicola Clayton

Philip Mynott

Nicola Clayton

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