CAPTIVE FLEDGLING AMERICAN KESTRELS PREFER TO PLAY WITH OBJECTS RESEMBLING NATURAL PREY

Object play may be a mechanism by which young predators acquire skills in manipulating prey, as well. as physical strength and endurance. It has also been proposed that fledgling raptors play with live or dead prey if available, but would play with surrogates such as sticks or gr ass if not. Different objects were offered to captive fledgling Americ an kestrels, Falco sparverius, to test whether they prefer to play wit h objects resembling prey. Individuals were divided into two groups: t hose in treatment A were offered mouse mimics, along with one of four objects (large and small pine cones, long and short twigs) which were alternated daily. Individuals in treatment B were offered bottle corks , and the same type of alternative objects as in treatment A. There we re no significant differences in the mean number of play instances of birds in each of the two treatments (total of 506 instances). However, fledglings in treatment A played significantly more with the mouse mi mics, whereas fledglings in treatment B played with the different obje cts in proportion to their availability. These results support the hyp othesis that young raptors devote a relatively fixed amount of time to object manipulation, and that they prefer to manipulate objects resem bling natural prey. The same set of objects were offered to adult Amer ican kestrels, but they were never manipulated. This suggests that obj ect play has a function in the maturation of hunting skills of young r aptors. (C) 1996 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour