Function of mobbing alarm calls
Nora Carlson is a PhD student working in both the Templeton and Healy labs at St Andrews. She is interested in the content and function of mobbing alarm calls given by various tit species in the presence of different…
Category: Research highlights
Context papers
Morgan, K. V., T. A. Hurly, M. Bateson, L. Asher, and S. D. Healy. 2012. Context-dependent decisions among options varying in a single dimension. Behavioural Processes 89:115-120. S. D. Healy, and T. A. Hurly. 2002.…
Taste papers
Bacon, I. E., Hurly, T. A. & Healy, S. 2011. Hummingbirds choose not to rely on good taste. Behavioral Ecology 22 (3): 471-477
Timing papers
Tello-Ramos M.C., Hurly T.A., Higgott C., Healy S.D. 2015. Time-place learning in wild , free-living hummingbirds. Animal Behaviour 104:123–129. Samuels, M., Hurly, T.A. & Healy, S.D. 2014. Colour cues facilitate…
The role of cognition in nest construction
A historical perspective “It is a somewhat remarkable fact that not withstanding the extreme popularity of the subject of Birds’ Nests, no book has yet been published entirely devoted to these beautiful and curious…
Paying attention to camouflage
That birds’ build camouflaged nests is well known, but whether this results from birds paying attention to the characteristics of their nest site and trying to find building material to match or simply from birds…
Learning to choose the right material
Birds’ decisions about what nest-materials to use to build with have typically been considered to be genetically determined. We believed learning may also be important in nest material selection as birds are known to…
Brain activity during nest construction
To implicate regions of the brain in nest construction behaviours, Zach Hall looked for correlations between levels of neuronal activity in different brain regions and the performance of nest building behaviours in…
Traplining
Hummingbirds forage by revisiting flowers and it is thought that they do so by following routes or sequences that are repeated through time (traplines). To determine if this is in fact the case, Maria recorded the…
Risk Sensitivity
Animals will often base their decision about where to forage on how variable a resource is as well as the size of the mean reward they can get from it. This is know as risk sensitive foraging. In the image below, a…