Dr. Steven Novella

No, you actually want to do it in fits and starts.

You don't want to do it all at once.

You want to take a few steps and stop.

Take a few steps.

But also, you never go directly at them.

You zigzag.

You're tacking towards them.

So, yeah.

So, it's slow, a few steps at a time, never directly at the bird.

So I don't know exactly what they told them to do, but they did say that they made them walk the same way because that does matter.

Oh, gosh.

They do things like poke them in the eyes randomly.

Exactly.

Yeah, so these are birds that would have a lot of contact with humans.

And I think that may be meaningful here, though they didn't do a comparison to rural birds or suburban birds.

But it does make it at least semi-plausible that these birds are learning something about human behavior.

We know that birds can recognize individual people.

And so it's not implausible that they just on average women, I don't know, they might walk faster or be more likely to want to feed them and therefore go right at them or something, whatever.

There might be some behavioral difference that the birds are learning.

Maybe.