Abstract
Diurnal and nocturnal raptors exhibit significant differences in foraging times and predatory behavior, yet little is known about the nesting defense responses of parent birds to these raptors during the breeding season. We observed the behavioral response of Japanese tits Parus minor to taxidermy dummies of Eurasian sparrowhawks Accipiter nisus and Indian scops owls Otus bakkamoena. Our results show that the nest defense intensity of Japanese tits against sparrowhawks is significantly lower than that against owls. Specifically, Japanese tits predominantly engage in distant observation behavior when encountering sparrowhawks, whereas they display more aggressive behavior toward owls. Overall, we propose that Japanese tits discriminate between sparrowhawks and owls, with the latter posing a lesser threat to adult birds.
Similar content being viewed by others
The Japanese tits evaluate threat level based on the posture of a predator
Nest site selection during the second breeding attempt in Japanese tits (Parus minor): effects of nest site characteristics
Diverse foraging strategies of an avian apex predator in an old-growth forest
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their deep gratitude to all of the contributing bird ringers from Chao Shen, to Jiangping Jin for field assistance, to Tianxu Qiu for his advice about statistical methods. The authors also highly appreciate that Prof. Kevin H. Mayo checking the text for English language.
Funding
This work was supported by the Scientific Research Fund of Jilin Provincial Education Department (grant No. JJKH20261560 to M.E.) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 32272650 to Duo Liu).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Ethical approval
The experiments comply with the current laws of China, where they were performed. Fieldwork was carried out with permission from the Zuojia Nature Reserve and the Forestry Bureau of Jilin Province of China (approval number: 2006178). The National Animal Research Authority approved experimental procedures in Changchun Normal University, China.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download CSV )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhang, Y., Shen, C., Qiu, T. et al. Japanese tits discriminate between Eurasian sparrowhawks Accipiter nisus and Indian scops owls Otus bakkamoena.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-63515-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-63515-x
Keywords
- Nest defense behaviors
- Japanese tits
- Sparrowhawk
- Owl
Source: Ecology - nature.com
