Four European Starlings including juveniles bathing in a garden fountain. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
Newcastle University scientists investigating why starlings bathe so often have discovered it alters their escape behaviour.
And clean birds make the most accurate flyers.
When sent through an aerial obstacle course, birds that had bathed were slow but accurate, whilst birds that hadn’t were faster but suffered more collisions.
Writing in the journal Animal Behaviour, the team suggests this is because a bird’s sense of anxiety may be linked to its bathing regime – with unwashed birds the most likely to get into a flap.
Newcastle University’s Dr Ben Brilot and colleagues carried out the study after observing that captive birds often bathed after sessions in which they had been caught and handled suggesting that bathing may help to realign feathers that have been damaged or disordered.
They set up a series of experiments to test this, where birds’ escape responses were measured after being handled and then being given access to either full or empty bird baths. Each bird was startled into an escape response by a loud bang played as its cage was opened, and flight performance was assessed by means of an aerial obstacle course comprising 38 weighted strings hanging from the ceiling.
European starlings that had been given access to bathing water just prior to the test flew more accurately through the obstacle course, hitting fewer strings than birds that were denied a bathing opportunity.
