This morning I watched a blue heron fly majestically into the pond across the street, only to be immediately shown by an irate goose that pecking order is not necessarily proportional to wingspan.
Miller, Greig and their collaborators fed the first wave of that data into algorithms to condense a web of relationships into a simple rank. That rank not only reflects the relationship of frequent combatant pairs such as the house sparrow and the blue jay, but also accurately predicts which bird will dominate when two distant species meet for the first time.
This morning I watched a blue heron fly majestically into the pond across the street, only to be immediately shown by an irate goose that pecking order is not necessarily proportional to wingspan.
This is an interesting article, btw:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/11/28/bird-feeder-pecking-order/ www.washingtonpost.com
oh my god yes this is good. get a bunch of little old ladies who love to sit and watch the bird feeder to send in their observations any time the birds scuffle and use those absolute REAMS of data to literally make a Bird Tier List. this rules. they even found some rock-paper-scissors setups between specific bird species...
also the very last line knocked the wind outta me
Is there any plan to do this for mammals? This morning in our yard we saw a woodchuck retreat from a rabbit, who was then in turn chased off by an angry chipmunk.
Here's the bird tier list, by the way:
with an image ID, too, because I like typing bird names
I saw Badger chasing an opossum 3 times his size once, and I guess scavengers famous for their "play dead" tactic aren't gonna be that dominant
So with the opossum I saw a representative animal of the American Southeast around here and that coyote was Southwest, now we just need a pond with like, lobster and an orca