Great tit

In the UK for years, milk was delivered to your front door in bottles with foil caps.

Great Tits, a common songbird in the UK, learned how to peck through the foil to get at the cream.

The skill spread, but how? To find out, researchers launched a series of experiments.

Males from different subpopulations were captured, trained in one of two different but equally effective ways of opening a box to get food, and re-released into the wild.

Social conformity is a powerful force for birds as well as people.

But when the researchers did a follow-up experiment and changed one method of opening the box to be more effective, nearly half of the birds switched to the more effective method in just 14 days.

It seems that great tits can stand up to peer pressure if they see there's a better way of doing things.

For Bird Note, I'm