Cautious or Courageous: How Bold Are Your Birds?

You can help in a new study of bird personalities

By Janis L. Dickinson, Caren Cooper, and Tina Phillips

Participants will record how birds respond to a harmless novel item on the nest box.

Diane L. Tessaglia-Hymes

How do animals respond when confronted with something new? Will they be cautious or curious? By observing pets we know that animals vary in personality?some are shy and others bold. The same thing is true in the wild, where just how birds react to new situations may determine how successful they are in exploring unknown places, sampling new foods, and responding to predators they have never seen before.

How does the place where a bird lives influence its personality, and how does its personality affect how well a bird succeeds in its environment? These are some of the questions that citizen-science participants will address in a new study from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The "Personality Profiles" project asks participants to affix a harmless novel object, such as a bow made of black-and-white checkered caution tape, to the outside of a nest box and to record how the birds respond. The results will improve our understanding of bird personalities, with potential implications for conserving birds in human-dominated landscapes.

Tree Swalow by Charles Harper

In the 1980s, Russ Greenberg, director of the Migratory Bird Center, was perhaps the first ornithologist to examine birds' responses to novel objects as an adaptive psychological trait. He used unfamiliar test objects, such as purple Easter grass, to examine neophobia, or fear of novel objects, in the laboratory and field. He discovered among other things that Chestnut-sided Warblers were more shy about foraging near novel objects than were Bay-breasted Warblers. Chestnut-sided Warblers were also less adventurous in their foraging behavior under natural conditions.

With the help of citizen scientists, the Personalities Profiles experiment will investigate neophobia in multiple species, asking how these traits vary over a broad geographic scale. A study of variation in bird personality traits has never been attempted at this scale, and examining variation in several species across the continent is likely to produce interesting results.

This project is founded on the idea that birds' personalities are shaped by their lifestyles as well as recent evidence that bird personalities are inherited. P. K. Drent and colleagues found that personalities, or "coping styles," have a genetic basis in the Great Tit, a European bird related to North American chickadees. For Great Tits, the benefits of boldness vary depending upon how intensively individuals are forced to compete for food and other resources. In a highly competitive environment, it probably pays to be bold, but it is likely that boldness also has costs, such as increased predation, which is disadvantageous when resources are plentiful.

Do bird personalities vary geographically in predictable ways? By focusing on a particular aspect of boldness?the willingness to approach a novel object?the Personality Profiles experiment will ask whether birds that are successful in urban areas tend to be bolder than their country cousins. Bold birds may thrive while shy birds have greater difficulty adapting to altered landscapes where they encounter novel objects daily. Similarly, migrants may be bolder than residents because they encounter more novelty and must be ready to explore and rapidly exploit new food resources, roost sites, and hiding places.

We are hoping that participants across the continent will join the project so that we can compare birds from different regions. For example, in southwestern states, including California, Western Bluebirds live on their territories year-round and spend the winter in family groups. In northern places such as Montana and Alberta, Canada, they are almost exclusively migratory. To our knowledge, no one has ever studied bluebird personalities to determine how migrants and residents differ in their responses to novel objects. It is even possible that all bluebirds are very bold?after all, nest boxes are themselves novel objects, and bluebirds have taken quite readily to them!

If you have cavity-nesting birds in your yard or local parks, we hope you'll take part in the pilot study beginning this spring. To help, please join The Birdhouse Network, a citizen-science project that monitors the breeding success of cavity-nesting birds. For more information on how to join the Birdhouse Network and help with the Personality Profiles study, visit www.birds.cornell.edu/birdhouse.

Janis Dickinson is the Lab's Arthur A. Allen Director of Citizen Science. Caren Cooper is a research associate in Bird Population Studies. Tina Phillips is project leader of The Birdhouse Network.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu