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Eurasian Jackdaw Chicks Learned to Recognise an Unfamiliar Predator Call From Adult Alarm Calls

Juvenile Eurasian jackdaw in Newcastle upon Tyne, England
Research · Behaviour

Nestlings of the Eurasian jackdaw (Coloeus monedula) learned to respond more vigilantly to the call of an unfamiliar potential predator after hearing it paired with alarm calls from adult jackdaws. The field experiment, published in Biology Letters on 4 March 2026, was carried out at wild nest boxes in Cornwall, England.

The researchers used calls from two species that were exceptionally unlikely to occur at the study sites: Eurasian goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) as a plausible predator and American golden plover (Pluvialis dominica) as a harmless control. Chicks were 20–30 days old during the playback trials.

Adult Alarm Calls Changed Responses to Goshawk Calls

Thirty-nine nests received playbacks. After data-quality exclusions, 29 nests remained for analysis. During training, unfamiliar goshawk or plover calls were paired either with anti-predator scold calls from jackdaws or with neutral contact calls.

Vigilance increased substantially when the goshawk call was played after it had been paired with scold calls. No comparable increase followed training in which the goshawk call had been paired with contact calls.

The Learning Response Was Selective

Pairing the harmless golden plover call with adult scold calls did not increase vigilance to that call. The result therefore did not support a simple tendency to learn fear of any unfamiliar sound heard alongside an alarm. The authors suggest that jackdaw nestlings may be predisposed to form fear-related associations with biologically relevant predator cues.

The chicks did not need to see a goshawk or experience an attack for their later response to change. However, the experiment tested only one predator and one non-predator species, so the authors treat the proposed selectivity or “preparedness” as a possibility that requires further testing.

Sources and image credit

  1. Broad, H. R., McIvor, G. E., & Thornton, A. (2026). Socially learnt predator recognition in nestling jackdaws. Biology Letters, 22(3), 20250770. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2025.0770Primary peer-reviewed open-access study published 4 March 2026 under CC BY 4.0. Thirty-nine wild nests received playbacks; after data-quality exclusions, analyses used 29 nests. Vigilance increased after unfamiliar goshawk calls had been paired with jackdaw scold calls, while responses to the non-predator control did not show the same learning effect.

Image: Conor Lawless — juvenile Eurasian jackdaw in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, photographed 14 June 2011; Wikimedia Commons. Representative image for this story; not presented as an animal or scene from the reported study or event. · CC BY 2.0 · Source

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