Does city life reduce neophobia? A study on wild black-capped chickadees

As human populations increase and city borders grow, many animals have to modify foraging behaviors in order to exploit evolutionarily novel urban food sources that could aid their survival. Neophobia, the fear of novelty, can lead to missed opportunities in these cases. Here, we studied the novelty response of wild animals in ecologically relevant conditions while controlling for individual characteristics and potential differences in foraging group size. We predicted that urban black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) would be more likely to initially contact novelty than rural chickadees and that subordinates and juveniles would be more likely to first contact novelty than dominants and adults, respectively. We ran replicated experiments using three novelty types (object, color, or food) on six sites, during which we registered feeder choice of 71 tagged individuals. We found that urban chickadees showed less neophobia than their rural counterparts, the latter having a higher probability of initially contacting the familiar feeder before approaching the novel feeder. There was no significant effect of an individual’s dominance, age, or sex on its first choice of feeder, nor was there any effect of novelty type. Overall, our results suggest that urban chickadees exhibit less neophobia than their rural counterparts because they have generally learned to tolerate novelty in their habitat, they have adapted to live in an environment that rewards low neophobia, and/or they are less reluctant to use feeders at new locations. Lay Summary Black-capped chickadees living in the city are less wary of new items that appear in their home range than forest-dwelling chickadees. Their response to novelty is not affected by how dominant they are, whether they are an older or younger individual, or whether they are male or female. Even the size of their foraging group or the nature of the new item does not influence the amount of wariness they exhibit.