No Bird Wants to Live in a Murder Nest
In the spring of 2019, the biologist Tore Slagsvold headed into the forests outside Oslo to stage a series of tiny crime scenes. He didn’t need bullets, or bootprints, or even bodies or blood; only a handful of plush, white feathers.
Slagsvold’s audience was avian—the region’s blue tits and pied flycatchers. And with any luck, his faux, fluffy evidence was going to scare the bejesus out of them. He set up several nest boxes and scattered the feathers inside, and just as he hoped, the birds balked. They were, Slagsvold told me, afraid of the feathers, or at least what they seemed to represent: fresh violence, a predator on the loose, the possible remnants of a sharp-toothed weasel’s afternoon snack. The likely fate that awaited them, should they dare enter such an accursed abode.
The danger, of course, wasn’t actually real. “The key word is deception,” said Slagsvold, of the University of Oslo, who’s been studying birds for some 50 years. The ruse sounds mean. But Slagsvold’s experiment, published in a study out today, was a perfect pantomime of the clever lies he thinks the animals tell one another in places where nest sites are scarce. They essentially fake their own death, he argues, painting a portrait so horrific that it disincentivizes their rivals from taking over the home they have painstakingly built. In much the same way that a grisly murder can crater the property value of a house, stray feathers spoil an alluring cavity’s appeal. The birds manipulate the real-estate market to their benefit.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/11/birds-nest-feathers-crime-scene/620711/
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