THE SOCIAL CONNECTON
GETTING TO KNOW YOU
Multiple tit species, including Blue Tits (opposite), abound in Wytham Woods. Above is a visual representation of the social network of Great Tits in winter: who interacts with whom, and how strong those ties are. Each circle represents one bird.
BARE TREES, THE SMELL OF DEAD LEAVES, SILENCE, MUD. The winter woods in Oxfordshire are lovely, if you like that sort of thing. If you’re a scientist with the legendary Wytham Tit Project, it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not. The batteries in your trick bird feeder must be changed every two days or your data will be ruined. And getting the most and the best data is the name of the game here in Wytham Woods.
So Oxford University graduate student Friederike “Freddy” Hillemann loads 50 pounds of rechargeable batteries into her pack and trudges through the bramble and bracken. We’re about 100 feet from a quartet of tube-shaped bird feeders when a spiffy little round green-and-yellow bird, a Great Tit, dives off the first tube. It looks like a chickadee that got lost in a watercolor kit. As we get closer, a smaller and drabber featherball called a Marsh Tit lands on the third feeder, which goes click click click.
Hillemann stops short. “Did you hear that clicking sound? That’s the feeder opening.” It’s the sound of success. Her gizmos, as intended, are spying on birds’ social habits.
Facebook would be envious of the information that Hillemann and her colleagues vacuum up: Who hangs out with whom, how often they have lunch.
Every fool knows that birds of a feather flock together, but it takes a scientist to find out why. With experiments like this one, Hillemann and a dozen others at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology (EGI) at the University of Oxford are probing what it means for a bird to have friends, and how those friendships shape life and death in the woods.
This particular experiment relies on “selective feeders” outfitted with circuit boards and programmed to open only for specific birds. When that tit alighted on that feeder, an antenna on the tube pinged
