Observational Spatial Memory in North Island Robins (Petroica longipes)

Breeding biology of North Island robins (<em class="sciname">Petroica australis longipes</em>) on Tiritiri Matangi Island, Hauraki Gulf, New Zealand

We studied North Island robins over 7 breeding seasons following their reintroduction to Tiritiri Matangi Island. All robins bred in their first year if a mate was available. They usually retained pair bonds for life but some females switched mates within or between breeding seasons. There were 2 instances of sequential polyandry, where a female laid a clutch with a new male while her previous ...

Memory for Multiple Cache Locations and Prey Quantities in a Food-Hoarding Songbird

Most animals can discriminate between pairs of numbers that are each less than four without training. However, North Island robins (Petroica longipes), a food-hoarding songbird endemic to New Zealand, can discriminate between quantities of items as high as eight without training. Here we investigate whether robins are capable of other complex quantity discrimination tasks. We test whether their...

The Ability of North Island Robins to Discriminate between Humans Is Related to Their Behavioural Type

Animals are able to learn to identify persistent threats to themselves and their offspring. For example, birds are able to quickly learn to discriminate between humans that have previously threatened their nests from humans with whom they have had no prior experience. However, no study has yet examined whether a bird's ability to discriminate between humans is related to the bird's underlying b...

Reasoning about “Capability”: Wild Robins Respond to Limb Visibility in Humans

Little comparative work has focused on what nonhumans understand about what physical acts others are capable of performing, and none has yet done so in the wild, or within a competitive framework. This study shows that North Island robins visually attend to human limbs in the context of determining who to steal food from. We presented 24 wild North Island Robins (Petroica longipes) with two exp...

Wild psychometrics: evidence for “general” cognitive performance in wild New Zealand robins Petroica longipes