Early bird catches the worm... for dinner

Birds, such as great and blue tits, scout for food in the morning but only return to eat it in late afternoon to maximise their chances of evading predators in the day without starving to death overnight, Oxford University research has found. This 'early bird' strategy was revealed by a team studying the winter foraging behaviour of birds in Wytham Woods, near Oxford. The researchers fitted over 2,000 birds with tiny PIT radio tags. They then used 101 feeders which detected these tags and captured the exact time individual birds found each feeder. By moving 36 of these feeders around the forest throughout the day, and recording the results, the team showed that birds gathered information about new food sources during the morning so that they could then eat it later in the day. The birds studied were a mixture of great tits ( Parus major ), blue tits ( Cyanistes caeruleus ), marsh tits ( Poecile palustris ), coal tits ( Periparus ater ), and nuthatches ( Sitta europaea ). A report of the research is published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters this week.