Brash birds get nabbed more often: personality may affect which flycatchers end up in the lab.

Who knows whether birds have their own snarky personality jokes. But researchers now say collared flycatchers with a dashing and curious character are especially likely to get caught in researchers' traps.

The trappable birds readily explore novelties and take risks in the wild, says Laszlo Zsolt Garamszegi, now at Dofiana Biological Station near Seville, Spain. And their susceptibility comes from that behavioral style, Garamszegi and colleagues report in the April Animal Behaviour.

Early work on bird "personality," called behavioral syndrome, has tested birds in controlled settings. But Garamszegi, then at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and his colleagues watched wild collared flycatchers (Ficedula albicollis) to see if individuals had syndromes and if those syndromes, rather than age and condition, affected the ease of trapping.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a test for readiness to cope with novelty, researchers assessed each male's typical behavior by placing a live female in a cage at his nest box. Then researchers attached a novel object, a piece of white paper, to the male's nest box and watched to see how curiously he explored the oddity. To grade birds' willingness to take risks, researchers determined how close a bird would let them approach. And for aggressive tendencies, the researchers observed how vigorously a territory holder objected to the arrival of a caged male.

With these data, researchers found links between individuals' behaviors in different contexts. Birds that explored novelties readily were also likely to allow humans to get close. After trapping attempts, the researchers found birds with these two traits were also more likely to get caught.

"Your capturing method really influences the outcome of your study," says Garamszegi. In fact, after dropping data from shy, untrappable birds, the researchers redid the behavioral syndrome analyses and found the strength of some of the links changed. "When you have a different sample, you may find completely different biological patterns," he says.

Ann Hedrick of the University of California, Davis, who studies behavioral syndromes in crickets, says the work "draws attention to an important consideration m designing future studies."