Smart Birds Make the Worst Parents

After patching up the hawk mount I continued my experiment, but I also wanted to know how both parents responded to a predator after having invested even more in their offspring. Since both parents feed their chicks, I conducted similar trials once the chicks had hatched and the parents were feeding them as nestlings. I found that both when parents were incubating, and when they were feeding their nestlings, they were hesitant to enter their nests in the presence of these ‘hawks’. However, the parents responded differently depending on how far up the mountain they lived. If they were from high elevation, the parents were much more likely to be scared away by the ‘hawk’ predator.



To find out whether chickadees that live high up behave differently in response to predators, I carried out an experiment. To do this, I placed a tripod at the entrance to a nestbox and scrambled away to become one with a distant pine tree, while keeping my binoculars trained on the recently departed female and the nest. When the female returned, what did she do? The mother stopped short of the nest area, rather than ‘bird’-lining it straight for the entrance. She was agitatedly hopping from branch to branch scolding the hawk for being near her nest. She flew off, only to return later. Eventually, she entered the box to make her eggs hot.


How might these unexpected results be explained? One possibility comes from a study on a closely-related English bird called the Great Tit (leave it to old English men). Ella Cole and her colleagues found that parents who were better at solving a novel problem were also more likely to abandon their offspring when disturbed. High elevation chickadees, like their problem-solving cousins, have superior cognition compared to their less smart low elevation counterparts. Mountain Chickadees use food-storing as a way to survive winter. Since high elevation chickadees contend with harsher environments, they have superior spatial memory than low elevation chickadees, allowing them to recover enough stores to survive more severe winters. So, could it be that there is some kind of trade-off between being smart and being willing to take a risk? The reason behind these results remains intangible, but maybe smart individuals just make poor parents.