How Birds Outwit Scientists

In a pilot study, scientists fitted five Australian magpies with GPS trackers and harnesses to study their movements.

But the magpies had other ideas. Within minutes of being fitted with tiny, backpack-like tracking devices, the birds began showing evidence of cooperative “rescue” behavior to help one another remove the trackers.— and what the experience taught them about bird behavior and designing studies of wild animals.In recent years, scientists have used Global Positioning Systems devices to precisely track the movements of a number of animal species.

The other novel aspect of the tracking device was the design of its harness. The backpack-like harness was engineered with a single weak point that could be unlocked with a magnet. The idea was that when a bird returned to the feeding station, it would encounter a magnet that would release the harness and tracker, allowing for easy retrieval without the need for recapture.

It wasn’t an anomaly. “Our pilot study involved fitting five birds with trackers and by the end of day three, none of the birds had their trackers on,” says Potvin. The researchers say that their observations closely resemble a rarely described behavior called “rescuing.” Rescuing is a specific form of cooperative behavior that involves the seemingly altruistic effort of one animal to work to free another individual in distress. It has been described in ants and some mammals, but only once in another bird species. In

“It’s also not very scientific, either, because they are changing their behavior based on the things we are doing and that’s never what you want when you are doing a study of natural behavior in the wild.”

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