Wild Birds Gesture ‘After You’ to Insist Their Mate Go First
Like humans, these small Japanese birds communicate abstract concepts with gestures
Yasumasa Ochi/Aflo/Alamy Stock Photo
To communicate without words, humans use a host of gestures—whether a wave to wish someone goodbye, a thumbs-up to indicate approval or “flipping the bird” to suggest something far less polite. While animal researchers have observed species such as great apes, ravens and fish using gestures to communicate with others, those behaviors have typically been limited to so-called deictic gestures that convey more literal meanings, such as pointing out significant objects or locations. Symbolic gestures, on the other hand, convey more abstract messages and are thought to require more complex cognitive skills than nonhuman animals possess.
Now researchers have found, in a particularly polite example, the first documented evidence of a a symbolic gesture used by birds. When entering their nest box, Japanese tits (Parus minor) apparently flutter their wings to say “after you” to their mate.
For the new research, published on Monday in Current Biology, scientists in Japan analyzed the behavior of eight breeding pairs of the wild birds over 321 total nest visitations as the pairs brought food into nest boxes to feed their young.
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Toshitaka Suzuki, an animal communication researcher at the University of Tokyo, and his colleague Norimasa Sugita of the University of Tokyo were interested in Japanese tits because of their complex vocal communications. These birds produce specific vocal sounds to convey messages that can be combined into phrases with particular grammatical rules. The researchers…
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