Social learning about food in birds

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Abstract
Introduction Since the classic studies on potato and wheat washing in Japanese macaques (Kawai, 1965), traditions have often been studied in nonhuman animals because they represent an important precursor to human culture. This anthropocentric program has led many researchers to study primates and to focus on cognitive traits that are associated with human culture, for example imitation, language, tool use, and theory of mind. In this perspective, the study of nonhuman culture has recently culminated in the demonstration that wild chimpanzees in seven African populations show as many as 39 behavioral variants that may be attributed to “culture” (Whiten et al., 1999). For psychologists and anthropologists, the concern with precursors of human behavior in the closest relatives of Homo sapiens is perfectly justified. For biologists, however, the evolution of cognition must be studied on a much broader and phylogenetically distant set of taxa; in comparative biology (Harvey and Pagel, 1991), one of the goals is to remove phylogenetic influences from taxonomic data and to look for independent evolution of traits as adaptations to particular ecological and life-history conditions. In this chapter, we compare the origin and diffusion of new feeding behaviors in birds and mammals. We begin by explaining why birds are particularly suitable to a comparison with mammals, and we discuss the use of anecdotal reports in the study of cognition. We then highlight three features by which the current literature on birds appears to differ from that on mammals and propose hypotheses to explain the differences.