Meeting Abstract
Accurate recognition of and appropriate response to predators can be a matter of life and death to free-living animals. Response to predator-related stimuli comes with trade-offs; foraging animals must give up feeding and expend energy to escape. This study aims to understand how different songbird species perceive and react to an array of visual stimuli, specifically images of various potential threats. Using a computerized bird feeder, we displayed different types of visual stimuli to the birds during their feeding visits, including eyespots, various predators, and human faces. We compared the responses of songbird species to these stimuli and found there is a significant difference in reactions that is species-dependent, as well as a difference depending on the type of stimuli. For example, our initial analyses comparing images of predator and competitor species showed that house sparrows (Passer domesticus) were less likely to respond to any of the stimuli, while more timid species like American goldfinch (Spinus tristis) reacted more aversively. Eastern gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) and mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) totally disregarded all stimuli. All songbird species appeared more attentive to predator images than to non-predators. Analyses of the eyespots and human faces data are on-going, but we expect to see similar species-dependent and stimuli-dependent patterns within these sets of data as well. Such a pattern would suggest that recognition of the predators tested here is common across various songbird species, but that species may assess the immediate risk of remaining to feed vs. costs of fleeing differently.
