Common Cuckoos can distinguish the calls of their neighbors from a stranger's

Male cuckoos appear to have a unique call that makes them distinguishable to and from other males. A new study appearing in Animal Behaviour shows that an individual cuckoo call may determine how a male responds to an interloper in his territory -- behaving more tolerantly towards neighbors and more aggressively towards strangers.

Common cuckoos, Cuculus canorus, are brood parasites: they lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, and let these hosts incubate their eggs and feed and rear the nestlings. Although cuckoos do not show parental care, they demonstrate complex social behavior, including territoriality and male-male aggression. Cuckoos have a well-known and simple two-phrase call ("cu" and "coo"), uttered by males during the breeding season. Previous studies have suggested that the "cu-coo" call of males is individually unique, allowing discrimination between different classes of males.

Lees meer: ScienceDaily

Why Birds Love Mobs

When I tell Katie Sieving, an avian wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida, that it’s probably a stretch to call “mobbing” an act of heroism, she laughs. Mobbing, as the term suggests, involves a mob: It’s when a group of animals band together to harass and drive out a common predator—a behavior already well-known to the ancients by the time Aristotle described it in 350 BC, in Historia Animalium. Squirrels, fish, African ungulates, otters, and even insects will mob predators, but birds have developed it to an art form.

Sieving calls the small North American songbirds she studies, known as titmice, heroes all the time. “They’re like the crossing guards of the forest,” she says, “letting the other birds know that it’s safe to cross.”

Lees meer: Nautilus

Nest-boxes no substitute for tree cavities, says study

Conservationists cannot consider nest-boxes to be a substitute for naturally occurring tree cavities, a study has suggested.

A study found the artificial nesting sites had higher humidity levels and poorer insulation than tree cavities.

Researchers also found some species, such as great tits, favoured nest-boxes while others, such as marsh tits, favoured naturally available sites.
The findings are reported in the Forest Ecology and Management journal.
The team of scientists from Wroclaw University, Poland, and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, UK, wanted to produce data that highlighted the anecdotal evidence between tree cavities and nest boxes.

Lees meer: BBC news