Wild rufous hummingbirds use local landmarks to return to rewarded locations
Abstract
Animals may remember an important location with reference to one or more visual landmarks. In the laboratory, birds and mammals often preferentially use landmarks near a goal (“local landmarks”) to return to that location at a later date. Although we know very little about how animals in the wild use landmarks to remember locations, mammals in the wild appear to prefer to use distant landmarks to return to rewarded locations. To examine what cues wild birds use when returning to a goal, we trained free-living hummingbirds to search for a reward at a location that was specified by three nearby visual landmarks. Following training we expanded the landmark array to test the extent that the birds relied on the local landmarks to return to the reward. During the test the hummingbirds' search was best explained by the birds having used the experimental landmarks to remember the reward location. How the birds used the landmarks was not clear and seemed to change over the course of each test. These wild hummingbirds, then, can learn locations in reference to nearby visual landmarks.
Citation
Pritchard , D J , Scott , R D , Healy , S D & Hurly , A T 2016 , ' Wild rufous hummingbirds use local landmarks to return to rewarded locations ' , Behavioural Processes , vol. 122 , pp. 59-66 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2015.11.004
Publication
Behavioural Processes
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0376-6357Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2015.11.004
Description
This work was supported by the University of St Andrews, the University of Lethbridge and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada.Collections
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