Unsupported Speculation

Drinking my coffee this morning, I’ve been watching a pair of starlings during bird breakfast hour also look for nest building materials. These two have apparently selected a forsythia bush in front of my house for their nest. The materials they seem to prefer for it are flexible and perhaps waterlogged sticks, because I saw sticks that were too rigid being rejected.

Their nest is located at the top of the forsythia, right in the middle, so that the starlings have to use a type of hover flying style to ease into the nest’s area and then descend into it. On a tangent, this will probably protect them from the crows that have been on a rampage raiding the nests of the blue jays around here.

The crows seem to have no problem locating the jay nests, with one nest in particular that is rooted right where the limbs expand out from the trunk of a silver maple, and perhaps the eggs of jays are big enough that they are worth a crow’s while to get a calorie boost by gobbling them up. Starlings are birds that are a similar size to blue jays, but a crow will have a hard time being able to land inside a forsythia and not sink and get tangled up in it.

Anyway, while I was watching the starlings, I observed that they didn’t have the human trait to return to a place where they succeeded in finding nest material. People tend to collect as much from a place as can be found as long as the labor to extract it isn’t too difficult for our available tools. For us, we perceive a success in a place as an indication to keep looking there, and will spend at least a little time ascertaining if we’re correct about that assumption before shuffling off somewhere else.

I thought about this, and I wondered if birds have a kind of evolved instinct to distribute their search for resources. Imagine this: Say you are a starling, and it is both breakfast time and nest building season. You’ve just found a good stick to help build your nest, and after dropping it off at your nest sight, why go back to the same place to give it a more careful search?

You were just there, and you found one obvious stick, but you didn’t see any food. Thus, isn’t it better to go somewhere else that gives you a chance of finding both another obvious stick and/or food? It’s better odds than somewhere you already were.

It is the relationship between how long you remain in one place attempting to collect resources vs time. Remembering the example of people above, when you stay in one place trying to see if there is more of something you found, you take on a risk that there will be very little or none there. Obviously the more time you waste, the less you have to show for it. But if you are able to quickly transit from place to place and collect anything that is of use, the rate that you find resources can be greater than if you stay in one place attempting to dredge as much from the area as possible.

This kind of reminds me of Brad Pitt in the Ocean’s 11 movies, who always maximized his chances of finding heist talent and fast food wherever he went.