World’s Politest Birds? Japanese Tits Uses Wings to Gesture ‘After You’ to Their Mates

As per researchers, when a mating pair of the birds would arrive at their nest box carrying food, they would wait outside seated on branches. Then, one of them (the female in most cases), would often flutter its wings at the other, apparently gesturing for the latter to enter their nest first!

While this little ritual the Japanese tits have carved out for themselves is heart-meltingly adorable, this discovery changes a lot of things, the long-held belief that only certain primates were capable of gestural communication being one of them.

In the past, creatures like chimps, bonobos, ravens and even some fish have been known to use ‘deictic gesturing’ as a form of communication where they point at objects or to something of interest to them. However, the open hand “after you” is a more complex ‘symbolic gesture’ that requires more cognitive skills and even visual communication.

Intrigued by the Japanese tit’s diverse vocalisation, where it used specific calls for different messages and even combined calls into phrases, researchers decided to look unto their potential use of physical gestures. The team observed eight breeding pairs (16 birds) and found that the birds would enter the nest to feed their nestlings one at a time.

Upon closely analysing over 320 nest visitations, the researchers gathered that the birds used the wing-fluttering motion to prompt their mate to enter the nest box first before following them in. Further, the Japanese tits exhibited this behaviour exclusively in the presence of their mates, and the mate almost always entered the nest box first after witnessing this behaviour.

“There is a hypothesis that walking on two legs allowed humans to maintain an upright posture, freeing up their hands for greater mobility, which in turn contributed to the evolution of gestures. Similarly, when birds perch on branches, their wings become free, which we think may facilitate the development of gestural communication,” says Professor Toshitaka Suzuki from the University of Tokyo.

“We will continue to decipher what birds are talking about through gestures, vocalisations and their combinations. This endeavour not only enables us to uncover the rich world of animal languages, but also serves as a crucial key to unravelling the origins and evolution of our own language.”

T​he findings of this study have been detailed in Current Biology and can be accessed here.

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