Pigeons discriminate between human feeders

Abstract

Considered as plague in many cities, pigeons in urban areas live close to human activities and exploit this proximity to find food which is often directly delivered by people. In this study, we explored the capacity of feral pigeons to take advantage of this human-based food resource and discriminate between friendly and hostile people. Our study was conducted in an urban park. Pigeons were fed by two experimenters of approximately the same age and skin colour but wearing coats of different colours. During the training sessions, the two human feeders displayed different attitudes: one of the feeders was neutral and the second was hostile and chased away the pigeons. During the two test phases subsequent to the training phase, both feeders became neutral. Two experiments were conducted, one with one male and one female feeder and the second with two female feeders. In both experiments, the pigeons learned to quickly (six to nine sessions) discriminate between the feeders and maintained this discrimination during the test phases. The pigeons avoided the hostile feeder even when the two feeders exchanged their coats, suggesting that they used stable individual characteristics to differentiate between the experimenter feeders. Thus, pigeons are able to learn quickly from their interactions with human feeders and use this knowledge to maximize the profitability of the urban environment. This study provides the first experimental evidence in feral pigeons for this level of human discrimination.

Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus) Discriminate Between Familiar and Unfamiliar Human Visual and Olfactory Cues

“…The ability to discriminate individual humans allows animals to direct appropriate behaviors towards specific individuals (Bee, 2006). For example, pigeons are capable of discriminating between friendly and hostile humans (Belguermi et al, 2011).…”

Have We Met Before? Pigeons Recognise Familiar Human Faces

“…Dittrich et al, 2010;Belguermi et al, 2011) we did not artificially manufacture encounters with specific humans involving exclusively negative or positive events. In fact, two of the familiar humans captured, released and fed the birds on a regular basis, one was only involved in cleaning the aviaries and one was entering the aviaries but not handling the birds directly.…”

“…Marzluff et al, 2010). Dittrich et al (2010) emphasised the importance of human facial cues for discrimination whereas other studies indicated a facilitating effect of different clothing or acoustic cues on discrimination (Belguermi et al, 2011;Sliwa et al, 2011;Wascher et al, 2012). Consequently, the use of pictorial representations offers the opportunity to restrict and select all cues given during discrimination.…”

“…Although both hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, recent studies with pigeons challenge the idea that these advanced recognition abilities predominately occur in species with "higher cognitive" abilities. Belguermi et al (2011) revealed that foraging feral pigeons spatially avoid human feeders that had previously shown hostile behaviour (e.g. arm waving or chasing) during foraging.…”

Discrimination of human faces by archerfish (Toxotes chatareus)

“…Chickens ( Gallus gallus domesticus )19 and jungle crows ( Corvus macrorhynchos )23 can also discriminate pictures of human faces, and American crows ( Corvus brachyrhynchos ) recognize individual face masks worn by humans and respond to a particular mask regardless of the person wearing it22. This ability may be a result of pre-existing neural specializations as these species often live in urban habitats and interact with humans3031 as well as demonstrate conspecific recognition based on visual cues3233343536. We therefore wondered whether teleost fish, the earliest vertebrate taxon lacking neocortical circuitry and one that is unlikely to have evolved any specializations for discriminating human faces, would show similar human face discrimination abilities.…”