Mixed-species bird communities can produce more useful predator warnings when different species contribute complementary information.
Researchers studied babblers, tits and their associated bird communities across ten nature reserves spanning 1,650 kilometres in China. Using simulated predators, acoustic recordings and social-network analysis, they found that groups containing both babblers and tits recruited up to 2.4 times more individuals during mobbing and generated calls spanning substantially wider frequency ranges than single-informant groups. The findings suggest that diversity among information providers can improve collective predator awareness across species boundaries.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1749-4877.70229
