These birds vacation at their peril

Monk parakeets take that saying to heart, according to new research by the University of Cincinnati.

These loud and gregarious parrots risk losing their hard-won social standing if they are absent from their flock for just eight days, biologists found. And the highest-ranking birds lose the most status during their brief absence, researchers found.

The study was published in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

UC scientists studied three groups of captive monk parakeets in 2021 and 2022. The study, led by postdoctoral researcher Annemarie van der Marel, focused on testing whether social history was a critical component in structuring how the parakeets gained and maintained their ranks within their groups. Researchers were able to identify each bird’s status in the flock’s dominance hierarchy by observing their interactions and quantifying rank using networks of aggression.

Van der Marel, a former postdoctoral researcher at UC, is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile where she is conducting research on social mammals. But monk parakeets are never far from her mind. Feral parakeets nest outside her home in Santiago.

“They’re loud. They are very affiliative toward some members of the group but can be quite grumpy towards others. There’s a lot of social drama,” van der Marel said.

The field crew recorded 100,000 fights over two years of experimentation. They recorded a lot of data on the birds’ efforts to increase or defend their social standing, said Elizabeth Hobson, a behavioral ecologist and assistant professor in UC’s College of Arts and Sciences.

“Monk parakeets are very feisty. They fight all the time,” Hobson said. “They generally don’t have knock-down, drag-out fights, they’re just constantly squabbling.”

Typically, an aggressor will sidle up to another bird and threaten to peck it. Often, the other bird flees before the interaction becomes physical.

“We call it a displacement. It’s clear who the winners and losers are,” Hobson said

Once the hierarchy had formed in the social groups, the researchers removed birds of different social standing for eight days before returning them and observing their reintegration to the flock.

“We predicted that if there was something intrinsic about the bird that gave it high rank, it should have been able to waltz back in and easily retake its former rank,” Hobson said.

Unlike some animal societies where the biggest individual is often dominant, researchers found that size doesn’t matter as much among monk parakeets. Instead, they get ahead through sheer force of will.

“It’s really striking to see a bird that had risen all the way to the top of the hierarchy have their rank fall so dramatically after being absent from the group for only about a week,” Hobson said. “Because this loss of rank isn’t associated with anything we measured about the birds, we think that rank loss is more likely the result of a change in social history, possibly because the removed birds were absent and couldn’t fight to hang onto their spot in the hierarchy.”