Welcome to brain Stuff a production of I Heart Radio, Hey, brain Stuff. Lorn vogel bomb here. When you see adorable little birds snacking on seeds at your bird feeder, or flitting about like they're about to so a dress for Cinderella, don't be fooled. Those birds will gang up and turn on you in a tiny, fluttering heartbeat. When birds detect a predator, they will start mobbing it. Mobbing here is when small birds join together to fend off a larger bird,
the small and large being relative terms. Here. Crows will band together to mob a hawk, and starlings will come together to mob a crow. Say, a bird or maybe a pair of birds, is near their nest of eggs or hatchlings. When they spy a predator. It could be an owl, or a cat, or even a human. The little bird will let out a call of alarm that alerts its squad. The squad arrives, and they physically mob
the predator. Sometimes birds join the mob not because they heard the call, but because they saw other birds headed for a mob. As studies have documented going back to the nineteen fifties, the birds have an arsenal of moves at their disposal they can hop and flap in the predator's face, they can dive bombit. They can even shove it around a bit if they're feeling brave, and some birds go for the full gross out factor by pooping or puking on the predator while they're mobbing it. They aim,
and they can be very precise about it. Though. While this is gross to us, who knows what hawks think is disgusting, But all that wet globby stuff serves a practical purpose too. It's sticky weight can ground the larger bird. Also, hummingbirds in a nine study showed that they're quite aware of their needle like beaks. They zoom in towards a predator and faint poking at its eyeballs. If that doesn't make an owl flinch, nothing will. So how can you
recognize a mob? No matter what good feathers taught us, the signs of a made bird aren't the same as a made man. But it can still be pretty easy to catch a bird mob happening. Often you'll see and hear a lot of excited birds in a tree. They're screaming and flapping and making a huge ruckus. There might even be a half dozen different species taking part. It's very likely that there's a predator in the tree and
those birds are mobbing it. If the predator doesn't get annoyed enough to leave, like maybe it's a taxidermy owl being used in an experiment, the mobbing birds can keep it up for hours. It will likely come as no surprise that crows are the biggest fans of mobbing other birds. They love to use this technique, and they are loud about it. If you have crows in your neighborhood, you have almost certainly experienced the sheer joy of a tree laden with black crows screaming their heads off for far
longer than they could possibly need to. Mobbing achieves three things For smaller birds, it can scare or annoy the predator enough that it moves on. The mobbing birds can make enough of a distraction that the predator won't be able to find the nest that they're probably looking for. And it can tell all the other animals around that there's a predator in the area, thus ruining the predator's surprise factor. Plus in researchers found yet another reason for
birds to mob showing off for the ladies. According to a paper published in behavioral ecology and sociobiology. Male birds will mob less threatening predators more aggressively if there are female birds around to watch, and so if the threat of danger is actually pretty low, the males will be particularly daring so the females can see what a great mate did be. If the predator is more dangerous, though, the males show off less and merely get the mobbing
job done. Today's episode was written by Kristen Hall Geisler and produced by Tyler Clang. For more in the so lots of other topics because it how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts on my heart Radio is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.