The growing body of research we have been conducting on #TheGrackleProject is showing that #behavioral #flexibility enables birds to #adapt to #human #modified #habitats , but plays a smaller role in expanding into new #geographic areas
Moving to new towns likely involves more #persistence because we previously found that grackles on the edge of their range in northern California had similar levels of average flexibility (though higher variance), but were more persistent than grackles nearer the center of their range in Arizona https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal.320/
This is also supported by the fact that the preliminary data we were able to collect on persistence in boat-tailed grackles (who are not rapidly expanding their geographic range) showed that they are less persistent than great-tailed grackles, while having similar levels of flexibility
Articles: https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.573 and https://doi.org/10.24072/pcjournal.582
Press release: https://www.mpg.de/25000634/0701-evan-when-the-city-comes-to-you-150495-x