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 behaviours 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, colour, 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...