Birds are just as fashion-conscious as people

Humans are not the animal kingdom’s only fashionistas. Tits can be fashion-victims, too, apparently. A study published in by Sonja Wild and Lucy Aplin of the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Biology, in Radolfzell, Germany, shows that, given the chance, they decorate their nests with this season’s must-have colour.Dr Wild and Dr Aplin were following up work published in 1934 by Henry Smith Williams, an American naturalist. He noticed that when he put various coloured balls of yarn out in his garden, almost always one and only one became popular that season for incorporation into local birds’ nests. But which particular hue was favoured varied from season to season. This suggested that the colour chosen by one of the early birds was spotted and copied by others.