RESUMEN
Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) and other species that feed at bird feeders balance the benefit of easy foraging with the added risk of predation. Individual birds respond differently to risky situations, and these differences have been attributed to the birds' personalities, which researchers commonly assess with an "open-field" behavioral assay. However, these behavioral assays in birds have not been compared to behavior in the wild in the context of foraging in the presence of a predator (i.e., risk-taking behavior). We color-banded chickadees in a wild population and conducted behavioral assays in the field. We later used foraging trials to investigate these color-banded individuals' responses to a predator (Cooper's hawk, Accipiter cooperii) model or a series of Cooper's hawk calls. We found that foraging black-capped chickadees responded more strongly to the presence of a predator model than to predator calls. Individual birds differed in their responses, and the behavioral assays (activity and exploration) predicted individual behavior in the wild during the foraging experiments. Activity and exploration assay scores were only weakly related, suggesting these two assays represent different traits. Both highly active birds and fast explorers exhibited some reluctance to visit the feeder (either reduced number of visits or greater latency to visit) when the predator model was present, a relationship that was somewhat unexpected. Our results suggest that standard behavioral assays predict behavior in the wild, but care should be taken when generalizing among species and studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
RESUMEN
Birds that forage at feeders must balance the risk of predation with the benefit of food acquisition. We color-banded black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) in a wild population and investigated their responses to a predator (Cooper's hawk, Accipiter cooperii) model placed 1 m or 5 m from a feeding platform. Over 40 trials, we recorded a total of 3,576 chickadee visits to a feeder. When the predator model was present, chickadees made fewer and shorter visits to the feeder, and there was greater latency to visit the feeder than during all other phases of the trials (prestimulus, poststimulus, and with the presence of a control model, a songbird [all p < .05]). Individual birds were highly consistent in the number of visits across phases (adjusted intraclass correlation coefficient = .958). Nonmetric multidimensional scaling allowed visualization of differences among individuals in the number of visits by trial phase. Although all 16 color-banded birds made fewer visits to the feeder when the predator model was present, some individuals were bolder than others, and some were more cautious. In addition, 4 individuals (25%) also made fewer visits when the songbird model was present, 3 different individuals (19%) also made fewer visits during the postpredator phase, and 1 (6.3%) individual was cautious about both the songbird and during the postpredator phase. Distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA) indicated that individuals' latency among phases explained significant variation in their number of visits. Examining behavioral responses on an individual basis allowed a more subtle understanding of behavior along the boldness-shyness continuum. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
