To call or not to call
Parent birds make a calculated risk when they alert their young to the presence of a predator, a new study by Dr Tonya Haff and Professor Rob Magrath has found.
Parent white-browed scrub wrens only give alarm calls when their young are being particularly noisy and are therefore at high risk from being overheard by a predator.
"Parents were sensitive to the trade-off between silencing young and alerting predators to the presence of nests," says Haff, who carried out the research for her PhD.
Scrub wren photo by Ben Pitcher
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