Bear Saves Drowning Crow

[hunter]

22. Just as they will follow and alert you to the presence of deer...

... they will avoid humans with guns who are out randomly shooting, and most especially individual humans known to shoot at them.

You see this with scrub jays and mocking birds. They'll leave harmless lazy cats alone, and harass cats known to be threats. They'll ignore most people, but remember people who have threatened them in some way.

On a campus of 51,000-plus students, paths are filled with students walking back and forth from class all day every weekday — so it’s no stretch to say that thousands of different people come within a few feet of mockingbird nests during the breeding season.

And yet, the mockingbirds in the study were clearly able to recognize and remember a single individual, based on just two brief negative encounters at their nest. Levey said that sharply contrasts with laboratory studies, in which pigeons recognized people only after extensive training. “Sixty seconds of exposure was all it took for mockingbirds to learn to identify different individuals and pick them out of all other students on campus,” Levey said.

For most wild animals, urban development brings less habitat and more predators. Many species flee or die off, but a few persist, and some thrive. It seems obvious that these species do better around people, but why?

Few people bother mockingbird nests, so that is hardly an answer. Rather, Levey said, the birds’ ability to recognize people suggests perceptual powers that give them an edge in dealing with the complexities of urban environments — such as being able to judge which cats may be aware of nests and which are simply passing blithely nearby.

http://news.ufl.edu/archive/2009/05/research-mockingbirds-no-bird-brains-can-recognize-a-face-in-a-crowd.html