You know, I think I might "milk" this Birdvelution (TM by Jeb Thurmond) goldmine for all it's worth. Get a lot of science grants and speaker's fees and groupies and all that stuff you get when you're a bigshot in Big Science.
If humans evolved from any animal, it might as well be birds. It turns out
pigeons have just as good math skills as monkees, and birds (unlike democrats) are
intelligent enough to know that Dick Cheney is a good guy:
...two researchers, each wearing an identical "dangerous" mask, trapped, banded and released 7 to 15 birds at five different sites near Seattle.
To determine the impact of the capture on the crow population, over the next five years, observations were made about the birds' behaviour by people walking a designated route that included a trapping site.
These observers either wore a so-called neutral mask or one of the "dangerous" masks worn during the initial trapping event.
After 1.25 years, 30.4 per cent of crows encountered by people wearing the dangerous mask scolded consistently, while that figure more than doubled to around 66 per cent almost three years after the initial trapping.
Marzluff says the area over which the awareness of the threat had spread also grew significantly during the study. Significantly, during the same timeframe, there was no change in the rate of scolding towards the person wearing the neutral mask.
He says the initial "dangerous" mask was a caveman's face with a mask of former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney the neutral or control face.
However the team made six other masks — combinations of male, female, Caucasian and Asian — which were used at various sites as a dangerous face or a neutral face. (Even birds know about the yellow peril).
These looked a lot more realistic and similar to each other, yet the crows were "very, very good" at identifying which person was dangerous.