Pick up sticks: Atlantic puffins twig how to use tools
Two birds – 1,700km apart – have been seen scratching themselves with sticks held in their bills.
Chance observations – one in Iceland and the other in Wales – suggest that Atlantic puffins should be added to an exclusive list of species capable of using tools.
Both reports were made by Annette Fayet of the University of Oxford. The first took place on the Welsh island of Skomer, where Fayet watched a puffin using a stick held in its bill to scratch its back for about five seconds. The second, in which a bird briefly scratched its breast, was caught on video.
“I only realised once I went through all the videos a few months later,” says Fayet. “I’d actually deployed the cameratraps to study their diet and chickprovisioning behaviour, so I was not expecting it.”
Puffins are not the first birds to be seen using tools – the crows of New Caledonia are probably the most celebrated example
– while chimps, elephants and parrots all scratch themselves with sticks. But puffins would be the first seabirds to be seen doing either.
Fayet suspects the behaviour serves to scratch an itch or dislodge ticks or other parasites. She says she’s now thinking about experiments to test the idea. “You would expect the behaviour to be more likely to occur in populations or years where parasite loads are high.”
On the other hand, it might yet turn out that the birds were simply performing a rare combination of behaviours that, together, happened to look rather like purposeful tool-use.
“If I had just seen behaviour that is in the video then I don’t think that I would have thought ‘Ah, tool use.’ However, I can see how the other observation could make the investigators think differently,” says Jonathan Green, a seabird ecologist at the University of Liverpool, who was not involved in the research. “A critical role of scientific papers is to stimulate debate and encourage other investigators to reflect on their own experiments and observations. Certainly, I might look on the funny things that seabirds do differently in future.”