Mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) can recognize humans who have threatened them before, and will divebomb them in self-defence, according to a new study whose echoes with Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie The Birds have garnered news coverage aplenty.

Douglas Levey and colleagues from the University of Florida, Gainesville report that the mockingbirds very quickly learn to pick individual human threats out of the crowd. Although crows and parrots are known to recognise individual humans, mockingbirds were not thought to be as clever. And they remain a wild species, though one that has happily adjusted to the presence of people (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., doi:10.1073/pnas.0811422106).

The birds in the study, nesting on the University of Florida campus, see hundreds of people walking past every hour. Most casual passers-by elicit no response, even if they touch the nest. But if a human stands close to them day after day – even wearing different clothing to vary their appearance – the mockingbirds attack, swooping down on the intruder.

“It’s amazing what a bird brain can do,” ornithologist John Fitzpatrick, of Cornell University, tells ScienceNOW.

“We don’t believe mockingbirds evolved an ability to distinguish between humans. Mockingbirds and humans haven’t been living in close association long enough for that to occur. We think instead that our experiments reveal an underlying ability to be incredibly perceptive of everything around them,” Levey ”https://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/18/mockingbirds-human-recognition">tells the Guardian.

Image: A mockingbird prepares to divebomb an intruder /Louis Guillette.