Julia Self

Thank you.

It's great to be here.

Yeah.

So I got into this in my undergrad and I just love animals.

And I think birds and the way that they build is just so cool to have this architect in a different species.

And I was also interested in how birds make decisions.

And so we used color as a stimuli, but it's just really exciting to see how they build and who doesn't want to know what an animal's favorite color is.

Yeah, so we give them different choices of material, and we found that some birds just very strongly preferred one over the other.

Like, they would spend hours and hours playing and interacting with and building with pink, for instance, and they wouldn't even, you know, glance at the green string.

And so it was cool because we saw that some birds had these very strong preferences.

And anytime you see this variation in what animals do, it's exciting because you're wondering why.

they have this variation.

And so, yeah, giving them these options allowed us to see their favorite colors.

That's a great question.

So we know this because we can change a bunch of other variables like where in the cage the string is and have these birds build multiple nests and they'll just keep choosing the same color.

It doesn't matter where it is.

And so we also see that, you know, if you're a bird who likes green, you're going to keep liking green, you know, like my experiment finds, even if, you know, you're in a group that all builds with pink.

So, these preferences are robust over time within these individuals and there's variation among birds in terms of what they like, which is cool.

Yeah.

So that's the cool part is it depends on the strength of the preference.