Some fowl species commonly pluck hair off unsuspecting animals, together with people, to make linings for his or her nests, scientists say. In a latest research, they element the hair theft phenomenon, citing quite a few YouTube movies that seize birds within the act. It’s not completely clear why hair is such an interesting development materials for these birds, however it could serve to discourage predators or may merely be a terrific insulator.

Many birds are identified to make use of mammal hair or fur of their nests, notably species within the household Paridae, together with tits and chickadees. It’s typically assumed that these birds nab hair that had fallen off an animal or from carcasses. But researcher Jeffery Brown, a pure assets and environmental sciences professor on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, at some point observed and took video of a titmouse rigorously stealing tufts of hair from a sleeping raccoon (the raccoon didn’t appear to note).

The theft made Brown and his colleagues curious sufficient to look deeper into the phenomenon, which they’ve now dubbed “kleptotrichy”—which roughly interprets in Greek to “hair-stealing.” Their new paper, “What the pluck? Theft of mammal hair by birds is an overlooked but common behavior with fitness implications,” was published final month within the journal Ecology. In it, they describe the unique incident (considered the primary documented raccoon hair theft on the planet of printed fowl science), in addition to others they uncovered in subsequent analysis.

In the tutorial literature, they discovered solely 11 examples of kleptotrichy talked about by different scientists, with most involving the Paridae household of birds. But as soon as they turned to the birding group and began trying to find movies on YouTube, they discovered a treasure trove of birds caught within the act. All informed, they discovered 99 incidents of kleptotrichy dedicated by birds towards people, canines, cats, raccoons, and even one porcupine. A big majority of those sightings, together with the unique raccoon theft, concerned the tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor), however two different Paridae species had been noticed within the movies, too.

The sheer quantity of sightings caught on tape, the researchers wrote, means that kleptotrichy “may be a far more common behavior than indicated by the scientific literature.”

As for why these birds would doubtlessly danger life and limb simply to seize some hair, that’s nonetheless left to be explored. Mammal hair is understood to be nice at insulating towards chilly, so the birds may be profiting from that. But it’s additionally attainable that the odor wafted from the hairs could also be sufficient to confuse or scare away predators and parasites that may in any other case prey on the birds, since an identical adaptation could be seen with some birds that really add mammal poop to their nests as a deterrent.

“Unexpected interactions such as these remind us that animals exhibit all types of interesting and often overlooked behaviors and highlight the importance of careful natural history observations to shed light on the intricacies of ecological communities,” mentioned co-author Henry Pollock, a postdoctoral researcher on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in a statement launched by the college.

Whatever the rationale for this odd behavior, the hair is clearly tempting sufficient for them to danger getting caught stealing it from dwelling targets. It’s one more instance of simply how little we nonetheless perceive concerning the lives of animals throughout us.