HARDLY bird-brained, the black-capped chickadee has one of the animal kingdom’s most intricate alarm calls. These palm-sized puffballs vary the number of syllables in their battle cry depending on the predator.
“We really were surprised at just how sophisticated the alarm call system is and how sophisticated the judgement of predation risk was,” says lead author Christopher Templeton of the University of Washington in Seattle.
Templeton and his colleagues listened to the alarm calls of a flock of six chickadees confronted by 13 bird predators, ranging in size from the 40-centimetre wingspan pygmy owl to the rough-tail hawk with 140-cm…
