Adult jackdaws learn to show tolerance towards youngsters in potentially valuable lesson for humans

Scientists have found that adult jackdaws can learn to be more socially tolerant towards youngsters.

Like many animals, adult jackdaws tend to bully juveniles, muscling them out the way of food and generally not paying them attention.

But young jackdaws have much that their elders could learn from – they are more open to new things and ready to exploit the opportunities associated with living alongside humans.

Behavioural strategies around who to tolerate and who to pay attention to were typically thought to be fixed and genetic, but researchers have shown that adult jackdaws can learn to be more tolerant of juvenile birds when it benefits them. 

The study, led by Dr Josh Arbon under the supervision of Prof Alex Thornton at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology and Conservation, used automated, computer-controlled feeders around nest box colonies at the Cornish Jackdaw Project, a long-term field study in Cornwall, to create a situation where adult jackdaws needed to tolerate youngsters to access food.

The feeders were programmed so that juveniles could always access them, but if adults arrived alone or with other adults the feeders would remain locked.

Adults could only fully access the feeders by not seeing off the juvenile birds and instead tolerating their presence.

They found that adults readily learned to do this, with the number of occasions that adult and juvenile jackdaws co-occupied the feeders roughly doubling across the course of the experiment.

Adults became 3.4% more likely to join a juvenile at the feeders (as opposed to another adult) with each occasion they were able to access food in this way. 

The researchers found that even though the adult jackdaws had interacted with specific youngsters they appeared to apply this new learned behaviour across all juveniles – a potentially important driver of behavioural change that could help jackdaws adapt to changes in their environment and explain their success in living alongside humans.

Professor Thornton said: “Social animals like jackdaws follow social rules and people generally assume these rules are genetically controlled and evolved through natural selection. Our experiment showed that these rules can actually be learned – even though adult jackdaws normally tend to bully younger ones, they can learn to be flexible if it benefits them.”

Dr Arbon said that “jackdaws normally tend to stick together with others of their own age, but by providing an incentive for older jackdaws to socialise with youngsters we saw a shift in the jackdaws’ social networks whilst also seeing them tone down their aggression.”  

Professor Thornton added that there are interesting parallels to human societies to be drawn, with older people increasingly turning to younger “digital natives” to learn about new technology.

“It’s a bit like me learning about my phone from my teenage son,” said Professor Thornton. “This flipping of the traditional learning strategies in which older, crustier types are now turning to the young to explain crucial elements of our world.”

“Wild jackdaws learn to tolerate juveniles to exploit new foraging opportunities” is published in Biology Letters.