Milk Stealing
Show notes
One of the strangest-ever crime sprees hit a small town in England in 1921. It wasn't murder or bank robbery - instead, people were finding that the milk bottles delivered to their houses would have the foil caps pierced and the cream on top of the milk sucked out. Turns out, birds - specifically a species called great tits - had learned a new way to find a meal. The wildest part is that within a few years, birds all over Europe had copied the behavior.
The original birds who had figured out how to steal the cream had taught their neighbors how to do it, who in turn, taught their friends. It's a phenomenon called social transmission, and scientists can replicate it by teaching birds a pretty arbitrary skill - like opening a puzzle box in a specific way - and watching how it spreads through a population. Studying this phenomenon gives scientists a window into the way non-human animals learn new behaviors, even naughty ones like stealing.
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