Every year, little black-and-white birds called pied flycatchers make the lengthy trek from sub-saharan Africa to northern Europe to feast on caterpillars, claim a nest, and have babies. This typically goes off without a hitch, and the birds return to Africa a few months later, offspring in tow. But recently, some flycatchers have arrived to find their nesting sites occupied by haughty, territorial . And those birds don’t just chase flycatchers away—they brutally attack them, kill them, and eat their brains.
The reason for such grisly bird murders might be due to a shift in migration and nesting timelines for both birds, according to a new published Thursday in Current Biology. While typically breed two weeks earlier than pied flycatchers, their breeding periods now occasionally overlap due to climate change-related factors, the authors say.
Sara Keen, a behavioral ecologist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved with the new study, says she was really struck by how behavioral changes in response to climate change can manifest in a wide variety of ways, like an uptick in macabre bird murders, for instance. “It can be particularly challenging to predict how mixed species communities will be affected,” she says.
More at: https://www.popsci.com/great-tits-murder-climate-change?src=SOC&dom=fb&linkId=62207998#page-2
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