Wild Songbird Foraging Data on Social Stability, Learning, and Scrounging

Experimental data from wild mixed-species bird flocks investigating the relationship between social structure and foraging behavior. The dataset includes manipulated social stability treatments and individual social network metrics, measuring learning latency, scrounging rate, and foraging rate. It was authored by Michael Reichert and last updated on 2026-05-11.

Use Cases

• Modeling the impact of social stability on learning speed based on manipulated flock treatments.
• Analyzing the relationship between individual social connectedness (weighted degree) and foraging rate.
• Investigating trade-offs between scrounging and learning in group foraging contexts.
• Testing hypotheses about selection pressures for group living based on multi-stage experimental data.

Strengths

• Data is from a controlled field experiment with manipulated social stability treatments.
• Includes multiple behavioral metrics: learning latency, scrounging rate, and foraging rate.
• File size is 1.7 MB, indicating a focused and manageable dataset.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.

Provenance

Source

Michael Reichert via figshare

Collection Method

Field experiment with wild mixed-species bird flocks involving feeder reward learning and social connection manipulation.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-11 19:32:21; freshness should be verified.