Is it worthwhile being a clever tit?

Scientists have established that great tits are very clever birds - they seem to be adept at solving all kinds of puzzles in order to obtain tasty morsels of food. But one question that has perplexed the scientific community is whether their ability to solve problems is of any advantage to the little birds. After all, in the wild it is not particularly common for tasty morsels to be hidden inside a box that can only be opened by pulling on levers in an exact sequence. Could it be that all this great tit intelligence is just going to waste?

Dr John Quinn led a team that investigated this question while based in Oxford. They tested the ability of some great tits to solve problems and then tagged them with tiny radio transmitters and released them back into the wild. The scientists were then able to monitor the reproductive success or otherwise of the clever tits versus their less clever fellows.

The results were surprisingly inconclusive. Clever tits were more likely to produce a clutch of eggs, but they were also more likely to abandon their eggs. The scientists theorised that the clever birds were more likely to be frightened away from their nests than their more simple-minded fellows. The overall result was that there was no significant difference in reproductive success between more and less clever great tits.

But that is not the whole story, as there is more to success in life than an ability to spew forth progeny into the world (at least I hope so). The scientists found that the clever tits were able to spend far less of their time foraging for food and so were able to enjoy more leisure time than their less bright fellows.

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