One morning whilst I was having my morning cuppa at Martin’s Lodge in Sinharaja, I noticed a group of Sri Lankan Blue Magpies flying into the lodge. Those magpies were searching for insects in the dining room and they barely took notice of me. This is something I never expected. Suddenly I recalled my memory of how we walked hours ten years ago in different parts of the Sinharaja forest to see these Blue Magpies.
I spent four days at Martin’s lodge and every morning I observed this behaviour of Blue Magpies. Every morning they flew into the open dining area at the lodge. They were there just before the first light. Here they mainly came for the insects that got attracted to the lights on the previous night.
When I observed this behaviour, I started thinking why do wild birds exhibit such behaviour around people. The simple answer to my question is, most wildlife can develop “Situation-Specific” responses. Behavioural scientists have grouped these behavioural responses into three broad categories, i.e. Attraction, Habituation, and Avoidance.
The attraction has been defined as “the strengthening of an animal’s behaviour because of positive reinforcement, and implies movement towards the stimuli”. Generally “attraction” is considered as an attraction to the food but it could equally relate to shelter or security.
It has been suggested that the behavioural term “Habituation”, being used misleadingly and often confused with the term attraction. Habituation has been described as “waning of response to repeated, neutral stimuli”. A bear can develop a habit of checking bins for food, this is attraction and not habituation. If this bear gets habituated to human food, it would ignore it.
Avoidance has been defined as “the opposite of attraction, an aversion to negative consequences associated with a stimulus”. A good example of this kind of behaviour is, Elephants learning how to avoid touching the electric fence.
So the adaptive behaviour showed by Blue Magpies at Martin’s Lodge was “Attraction”. Initially, I thought it was habituation as I straight away thought about the word “habitual”, but it has little effect on the ethological term “habituation”. This became more clearer to me when I observed another group of Magpies closer to the starting point of the Mulawella trail in the forest. This group was hanging out on the trees, and they carefully searched the area for any food scraps that visitors have left on the ground. They didn’t worry about the human presence at all. I was able to observe them very closely for maybe fifteen minutes and was able to take some pics as well. Further up on the main trail, there was another group around the research station and they also showed the same behaviour.
Apart from the Blue Magpies, there were two other bird species that showed similar behaviours. A Sri Lanka Spot Winged Thrush came into Martin’s Lodge and started hopping around the dining table to check for food items on the ground and on the tables. The Thrush didn’t have any specific time like Blue Magpies to visit the lodge and It was more human-friendly.
The other one to have the same behaviour was the Sri Lankan Jungle fowl. A male Jungle fowl followed me for approximately twenty meters on the main trail of the Sinharaja forest hoping that I would give him some food. I realized he was so spoilt by the visitors. I really don’t know how many of them do this. Hope not many. It is common to see Jungle Fowls coming to homes and home gardens that are adjacent to the forests to search for food. But it was the first time I observed this behaviour in the Sinharaja forest.
When I was observing the Blue Magpies on the main trail, I was wondering how wonderful it was to observe this beautiful bird that close. But at the same time I started thinking consequences of this behavioural adaptation by the Blue Magpies and other birds.
I believe this kind of behaviours are mainly functions of learning and they will be transmitted across generations by the parent birds. Therefore I am a bit concerned about this. Like you all, I don’t want to see Sri Lanka’s most beautiful bird begging for food from visitors.
We really need to explore these adaptive behaviours by birds at Sinharaja to mange this problem. We currently know a little about human-bird interactions at Sinharaja. Though these adaptive behaviours are not intrinsically good or bad, when the human-bird interface changes, some of these behavioural responses (attraction) could become detrimental for the birds especially for Blue Magpies. Hence I am asking you all to advice people not feed birds at Sinharaja.
