City Birds May Be Smarter Than Rural Birds, Study Finds

City birds may be smarter than rural birds according to new study.

City birds have adapted to their city environments having them to exploit new resources more favourably than their rural counterparts, according to researchers from McGill University in Canada.

The team examined the two groups of birds using not only associative learning tasks, but innovative problem solving tasks.

Innovativeness is thought to be useful in the "real life" of animals in the wild, more so than associative learning.

"We found that not only were birds from urbanized areas better at innovative problem-solving tasks than bullfinches from rural environments, but that surprisingly urban birds also had a better immunity than rural birds," first author Jean-Nicolas Audet, a PhD candidate at McGill, said in a statement.

Audet and his team examined 53 bullfinches from different parts of Barbados - something he was wanted to do after being terrorized by bold city birds at a restaurant.

"Since urban birds were better at problem-solving, we expected that there would be a trade-off and that the immunity would be lower, just because we assumed that you can't be good at everything," as both traits are costly, requiring a fair amount of energy and evolutionary time to develop, Audet said. "It seems that in this case, the urban birds have it all."

The study was published in the journal Behavioural Ecology.