Sneaky Birds Pretend To Be Hurt After They Noticed a Person Feed Another Injured Bird
A Reddit user (u/TheOddityCollector) came across a pretentious flock of birds and shared a hilarious occurrence with the internet. Generally, birds often exhibit atypical behaviors that are close to pretending. Parakeets are infamous for mimicry, while some birds like European Starlings can mimic the sounds of other birds, per All About Birds. While their cognitive abilities are not as complex as human beings, they can be occasionally deceptive to ensure survival. However, in the video shared on Reddit, the birds seem more dramatic than their survival instincts, and viewers are intrigued by the act.
Birds pretend to be injured for food
In a viral post with 98,000 upvotes, the Reddit user posted a snippet of a few birds behaving unusually near a home. Initially, two birds lay motionless, pretending to be dead or injured, when a third flies in and accompanies them. The bird spreads only one of its wings with its beak half-open and pretends to drop down on the floor. Almost all of the birds had their beaks partly open and put up an act pretending to be injured. According to the poster, the birds tried to secure food using the tactic after a person fed one an injured bird earlier.
“These birds saw a person feed an injured bird, so they all started pretending to be injured as well,” the caption explained. The Reddit post went viral and received over a thousand reactions from viewers on the internet. “Hello, I'm dead. Please feed me,” joked u/BabyGothh while u/Responsible-Fox9591 noted, “Birds are too damned smart.” “It honestly makes me wonder if we are vastly underestimating how intelligent dinosaurs were. It turns out that you can stuff a lot of intelligence in a small volume,” quipped u/anrwlias.
However, some viewers debated that the birds were not pretending with ulterior motives but were simply sunbathing. “Yeah, this video is a bit misleading. It’s been posted before, and every time it’s debunked. They’re just sunbathing,” contested u/Serawasneva. “This is a really common bird behavior that has nothing to do with them mimicking an injured bird. These birds are spreading themselves out in the sunny patch to either thermoregulate and/or flush parasites out of their feathers with the heat. Many species of birds do this,” explained u/Simon_Hans.
Birds showcase deceptive behaviors
According to ScienceABC, some bird species are masters of defensive deception. This behavior is referred to as injury-feigning, or broken-wing display, and is done to ward off predators from their young ones. “They ingeniously ploy a false ruse to lure the potential predator away from their young and towards themselves,” the report stated. Killdeer is one such bird species that pretends to have a broken wing and inches away from the nest while luring the predator away from their offspring.
Lena de Framond, lead author of a study on this bird behavior and an ornithologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology, said, “They do it instinctively. They don’t learn it.” The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society by B. Francis and colleagues. However, such behaviors are typical when a bird is tied to their nest. Therefore, the context of the birds showcasing strange behaviors in the Reddit clip remains unexplained.
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