Switching to one or the other : Shorebirds behavioural flexibility in food transport mechanisms

Shorebirds provide an excellent model for investigating the relationship between bill morphology and food acquisition. Food acquisition comprises three successive behavioural stages: foraging (locomotion and prey capture), feeding (food handling and transport), and swallowing. During food transport, these birds use two non-lingual mechanisms, surface-tension transport (ST) and ballistic transport (BT), whose characteristics depends on the kinematics of head and beak movements and the physical properties of the food. We investigated the behavioural flexibility of these transport mechanisms in captive and free-ranging individuals of two species with contrasting beak morphologies: the Pied avocet ( Recurvirostra avosetta ) and the Black-winged stilt ( Himantopus himantopus ). Although these species have beaks of a similar size, avocets are distinguished by their upward-curved beaks, whereas stilts have a rather straight beak. We examined the effects of food water content and the presence or absence of water in the beak on food transport by quantifying maximum gape, maximum head displacement, and maximum head velocity.

Transport kinematics were jointly influenced by food properties and water availability in the beak. Moist food improved transport performance in both species, whereas dry food required compensatory increases in gape amplitude and head movements, demonstrating that neither ST nor BT constitutes a fixed behavioural sequence. Species also differed consistently in their transport strategies: Black-winged stilts relied on slower, larger-amplitude head movements, whereas Pied Avocets exhibited faster, more precise movements, particularly when water was present.

These findings demonstrate that ST and BT share common biomechanical foundations while being governed by rapid kinematic adjustments to changing environmental conditions that probably correspond to flexible motor control. This behavioural flexibility in food transport is therefore likely to enhance feeding performance and ecological resilience in the heterogeneous habitats occupied by shorebirds, suggesting that context-dependent modulation of transport behaviour represents an important adaptive feature of these shorebirds.