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The social networking of wild birds has been mapped in unprecedented detail, using cutting-edge technology.

(Phys.org)A team, led by researchers at the Universities of St Andrews and Washington, used novel radio-transmitters to study the social networks of New Caledonian crows, a species renowned for using sophisticated foraging tools.

Data downloaded from the miniature tracking devices, which were attached to the birds as back-packs, enabled the researchers to infer their birds' social relationships, revealing a surprising amount of contacts.

Unlike conventional wildlife radio-tags, these new devices can both transmit and receive radio-signals.

Crucially, at the analysis stage, this allows the researchers to infer from the data how close two birds were to each other, based on the basic premise that close tags should exchange stronger radio-signals than tags that are farther apart.

The study is a crucial step towards understanding how tool-related information may diffuse in wild crow populations. A report of the research is published this week in Current Biology.

New Caledonian crows are the most prolic avian tool users. In the wild, they use at least three distinct tool types to extract invertebrate prey from deadwood and vegetation, with some of their tools requiring complex manufacture, modication and/or deployment.

Some scientists have suggested that certain aspects of these crows' sophisticated tool-use behaviour may be the outcome of social transmission processes, where birds observe, and learn from, other individuals.

The study, which was funded by the UK's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), examined whether such 'tool cultures' could exist in wild crow societies.

Dr Christian Rutz, a world-leading expert in the use of miniature electronic devices for studying the behaviour of wild animals (known as biologging) led the project.

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Mapping the social networking of birds