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Key points
- In a pilot study, scientists fitted five Australian magpies with GPS trackers and harnesses to study their movements.
- Within hours to days, other magpies had removed the tracking devices from all five of the study birds.
- This may be an example of rescuing behavior, in which one animal altruistically helps another out of a distressing situation.
In the summer of 2019, Dominique Potvin, an animal ecologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, was excited to begin a tracking study on Australian magpies. She and her team had an exciting new technology to test out and plenty of questions about the birds’ movements and social dynamics.
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.
Potvin and her colleagues describe how they watched their planned experiment implode in real time in a new paper — and what the experience taught them about bird behavior and designing studies of wild animals.
Best Laid Plans
In recent years, scientists have used Global Positioning Systems (GPS) devices to precisely track the movements of a number of animal species. However, the size of the technology has limited the types of species studied.
For instance, songbirds are typically too small to carry GPS devices. That’s one reason Potvin chose Australian magpies for her study. Despite their name, Australian magpies are songbirds, not corvids. Potvin says they are actually more closely related to robins than they are to crows.
Advances in technology have led to ever-smaller GPS tracking units. The ones Potvin used weighed less than one gram, no big deal for a 300-gram magpie. But small trackers come with their own challenges, including limited battery life and storage capacity.
To address these issues, Potvin and her team trained a group of local, wild magpies to come to an outdoor feeding station. At this station, the battery of the tracker could be wirelessly recharged and its data downloaded.
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.
Over many months, Potvin and her colleagues trained a group of magpies to visit the feeding station and planned their experiment. Finally, the morning arrived: They trapped five of the birds and fitted them with the GPS trackers. The researchers thought that all they had to do next was wait, watch, and entice the birds back to the station to gather all the data.
To the Rescue
Within 10 minutes of putting on the final tracker and releasing the birds, Potvin and her team witnessed an adult female magpie without a tracker pecking at the harness of a younger bird.
“At first we thought maybe it was just preening the young bird,” says Potvin. “But that bird worked for 20 minutes on the harness, testing different parts of it, until it found the weak point and it fell off.”
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 directly observed another magpie actively removing four of the five trackers. They don’t know if it was always the same bird helping out, or if multiple individuals worked to remove the trackers.
Although magpies are known to be intelligent and social birds, this illustration of complex problem solving still surprised and impressed the researchers. What’s more, the behavior appeared to be altruistic, in that there was no immediate, tangible benefit to the bird doing the helping.
“We could not find any other example of birds cooperating in this way to remove tracking devices,” says Potvin. “This is the first time this has been documented in the literature. It was devastating and kind of cool at the same time.”
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 a 2017 article, scientists described Seychelles warblers helping to untangle fellow birds from the sticky seed clusters of Pisonia trees. Potvin and her team suggest that what they observed is the first documented case of rescue behavior in Australian magpies.
Lessons from Magpies
Potvin says that part of the impetus for publishing her team's observations was to share their cautionary tale with other researchers. First, it demonstrates the importance of running small pilot studies before engaging in larger-scale experiments using tracking devices carried by animals.
“We learned that the magpies don’t like the trackers; they worked really hard to get them off every single individual,” says Potvin. “That tells us that it is not ethical to continue tracking them this way.
“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.”
In addition, Potvin and her team suggest that scientists interested in tracking species that are very intelligent and/or highly cooperative should be aware that “rescuing” may be an issue in their study design.
While Potvin’s tracking study of Australian magpies is shelved for now, she says it is still crucial to learn more about these birds. This is especially the case given a recent study that found that the increasing frequency and intensity of heatwaves in Australia may negatively impact not just the survival rate of magpie chicks, but also the cognitive performance of the birds. Those findings emphasize the importance of understanding the behaviors of these birds in a changing world. Even common species like Australian magpies may be affected by human actions in ways that aren’t always obvious.
Despite her disappointment in the outcome of this pilot study, Potvin says she has a begrudging admiration for the intelligence and social relationships of magpies.
“It may seem silly that we were outsmarted by birds,” she says. “But at the same time, I have to give these birds massive respect. I’m totally fine with being outsmarted by birds.”
References
Crampton, J., Frere, C.H., and Potvin, D.A. (2022). Australian magpies Gymnorhina tibicen cooperate to remove tracking devices. Australian Field Ornithology 39:7-11.
