Individual variation in Black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) foraging behavior in response to a predator model.

Birds that forage at feeders must balance the risk of predation with the benefit of food acquisition. We color-banded black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) in a wild population and investigated their responses to a predator (Cooper's hawk, Accipiter cooperii) model placed 1 m or 5 m from a feeding platform. Over 40 trials, we recorded a total of 3,576 chickadee visits to a feeder. When the predator model was present, chickadees made fewer and shorter visits to the feeder, and there was greater latency to visit the feeder than during all other phases of the trials (prestimulus, poststimulus, and with the presence of a control model, a songbird [all p < .05]). Individual birds were highly consistent in the number of visits across phases (adjusted intraclass correlation coefficient = .958). Nonmetric multidimensional scaling allowed visualization of differences among individuals in the number of visits by trial phase. Although all 16 color-banded birds made fewer visits to the feeder when the predator model was present, some individuals were bolder than others, and some were more cautious. In addition, 4 individuals (25%) also made fewer visits when the songbird model was present, 3 different individuals (19%) also made fewer visits during the postpredator phase, and 1 (6.3%) individual was cautious about both the songbird and during the postpredator phase. Distance-based redundancy analysis (dbRDA) indicated that individuals' latency among phases explained significant variation in their number of visits. Examining behavioral responses on an individual basis allowed a more subtle understanding of behavior along the boldness-shyness continuum. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).