By Susan Milius
Who knows whether birds have their own snarky personality jokes. But researchers now say collared flycatchers with a dashing curious character are especially likely to get caught and end up in lab studies.
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These trappable birds readily explore novelties and take risks in the wild, says László Zsolt Garamszegi, now at Do±ana Biological Station near Seville, Spain. And their susceptibility indeed comes from that behavioral style, Garamszegi and his colleagues report in the April Animal Behaviour.
Much of the early work on bird “personality,” called behavioral syndrome, has tested birds in controlled settings. But Garamszegi and his colleagues watched wild birds to see if individuals’ syndromes, rather than age and condition, affected the ease of trapping.