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Parents will do almost anything for their little ones. Parents of birds are no exception, and many go to great lengths to build the perfect nest for their chicks.
Many birds take this duty to a new level by plucking the hair of live animals to fill their nests, according to a YouTube video analysis.
Inspiration for the new YouTube study came in 2020. Study co-author Henry Pollock, postdoctoral researcher in ornithology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues were monitoring birds in a public park when they noticed a bushy tit (Bicolor Baeolophus), a small gray and blue bird with a sharp black crest. The bird was a common sight in the park, but biologists were shocked at what it did – stand on the back of a raccoon, plucking the animal’s hair. “At that point, my curiosity was piqued,” Pollock told Live Science.
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Chickadees are members of the Parulidae, a family of birds known to build nests containing mammalian fur. Bird watchers had speculated that the fur usually came from animal carcasses or stray hairs, Pollock said. “There is a lot of evidence of birds using hair in their nests,” he said. “The origin of this hair has never really been studied.”
Pollock sought academic explanations for the baffling behavior and failed. There was an article published in 1946 by a researcher named AC Bent, who described seeing a tit tears hair from the tail of a red squirrel. But the event was reported more as a curiosity than as an example of widespread behavior.
When Pollock realized that there were so few recorded sightings in the scientific literature, he turned to YouTube. A simple search revealed dozens of videos of birds braving large animals to steal their hair, presumably for nesting material – suggesting the behavior was widespread.
In their recent article, Pollock and colleagues wrote a formal scientific description of hair pulling behavior, which they call kleptotrichy, from the Greek roots “klepto-“, which means “to steal” and “trich-“, which means “’Hair.” They cited earlier anecdotal descriptions of avian hair pulling, as well as dozens of YouTube videos showing birds pulling hair out of birds. dogs, cats, raccoons and even human.
As to why birds steal hair instead of scavenging it, Pollock could only speculate. “There is an obvious fitness benefit to the behavior, otherwise it would not have evolved,” he said. Some birds are known to use hair to keep nests warm, he added, but that doesn’t explain why they would strive to pluck hair from living animals or why tropical species also incorporate animal hair in their nests. Another possibility is that using live animal fur helps birds avoid predators or parasites, but that hypothesis has not been tested, Pollock said.
Pollock credited citizen scientists with drawing attention to behavior that had mostly escaped the attention of scientists. “There is utility for birding and popular media,” he said. “It can give you a new perspective that you might not always get from the stuffy scientific literature.”
The article, “What do you want?” The theft of mammalian hair by birds is a neglected but common behavior with health implications, ”was published on July 27 in the journal. The scientific naturalist.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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