Wild Birds Remember a Novel Task for Nearly Two Years

A population of North Island robins in a New Zealand sanctuary provides a unique system for investigating the memory skills of birds in the wild.

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ABOVE: A toutouwai eats a mealworm that it retrieved after swiveling open a lid.
RACHAEL SHAW

New Zealand’s North Island robins (Petroica longipes), known as toutouwai in Maori, are capable of remembering a foraging task taught to them by researchers for up to 22 months in the wild, according to a study published on February 12 in Biology Letters. These results echo the findings of a number of laboratory studies of long-term memory in animals, but offer a rare example of a wild animal retaining a learned behavior with no additional training. The study also has implications for conservation and wildlife management: given the birds’ memory skills, researchers might be able to teach them about novel threats and resources in their constantly changing habitat.

“This is the first study to show [memory] longevity in the wild,” says Vladimir Pravosudov, an animal behavior researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno, who was ...

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Meet the Author

  • Amy Schleunes

    A former intern at The Scientist, Amy studied neurobiology at Cornell University and later earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is a Los Angeles–based writer, editor, and communications strategist who collaborates on nonfiction books for Harper Collins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and also teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University CTY. Her favorite projects involve sharing the insights of science and medicine.

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