'Tenacious' Australian magpies help each other remove scientists' tracking devices
Researchers say the birds outsmarting them was an incredible discovery in its own right
A group of Australian magpies have slipped free of their tracking devices — to both the chagrin and delight of the scientists who were studying them.
Researchers in Australia had placed sophisticated new devices — which look like little backpacks — on five birds, which were part of a larger group, in the hopes of studying their movements as they navigate challenges like urbanization and climate change.
Not long after, one of the untracked birds swooped down to liberate its brethren.
"When they started pecking at it, we were still a little bit cocky. We didn't think they were going to figure it out," lead author Dominique Potvin, an ornithologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.
Before long, she says the "tenacious" creature found the device's sole weak spot — a one-millimetre section — and pried it free. The researchers watched in awe as their expensive equipment fell from a branch high in the trees, she said.
"That's when all of our faces dropped and we just looked at each other and thought, 'Oh no, this is all over,'" Potvin said.
Watch: Australian magpies work to remove each other's trackers:
Within three days, all five birds had escaped the trackers.
"They flew away — started living their lives free as a bird, I guess you could say you say," Potvin said. "We lost our research subjects."
The researchers' findings are published in the journal Australian Field Ornithology.
The birds may have outsmarted the scientists and destroyed their expensive toys, but Potvin says that alone was an incredible discovery.
"We're just trying to see what happens and we just managed to discover kind of a new behaviour that hadn't really been documented before," Potvin said. "We made lemonade out of lemons, I guess."
While magpies are known to preen one another, Potvin said this is the first time they've been documented performing what could be interpreted as "rescue behaviour" — selflessly helping their fellow birds.
"You might be getting a snack after, you know, cleaning a parasite off another bird. But with this, they're not getting anything," she said.
"They might be strengthening social relationships and strengthening social bonds. But really, it seems very altruistic."
Kathy Martin, a University of British Columbia ornithologist, said Australian magpies are social and curious creatures, so it makes sense that the sudden appearance of the trackers would draw their attention.
What's more, she said, they have "wonderfully dexterous" beaks that can function as both hands and mouths.
"Birds can use their beaks to do very fine scale work," Martin said in an email. "So, it is not surprising that the magpies found the one weak spot in the attachment of their geolocator package."
In fact, she said she's encountered a similar phenomenon when her own research team forgot to apply super glue to the knotted lines on the radio transmitters they'd attached to rock ptarmigans in the Yukon mountains.
"Almost all of our 18 ptarmigans with these radio units were able to undo the knots and the radios fell off," she said. "We found all of the detached radios, but none of the birds."
In Potvin's study, she says it's unclear whether the same clever Australian magpie freed all five birds, or whether, once they'd learned how to remove the trackers, they freed them themselves or helped each other out.
"We don't actually know because, you know, they took the trackers off, so we couldn't track who is doing what," she said.
"It would be so fascinating to find out what the social relationships were like for the birds that were helping, and those that were standing still for 20 minutes, allowing the other bird to help them."
But for now, Potvin and her team are abandoning their magpie research.
"They clearly don't like the trackers, so we have decided it's not very ethical to continue to try to track something that doesn't want to be tracked," she said.
"So we might take our cool technology that we've developed for this project to a different species, maybe one that's slightly less intelligent. We're looking at a few lizard candidates at the moment."
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview with Dominique Potvin produced by Niza Lyapa Nondo.
