Hierarchy (of hens?)

Usage examples of pecking.

Each chick has had three goes at pecking the little bead, and most will have done so on at least two occasions.

Very sensibly, when I show them a similar bead next time, instead of pecking it, they reject or avoid it.

Birds explore their world visually and by pecking, not by sniffing, and can therefore make some types of association much more easily than others.

They pecked and got sick as before, and later avoided a similar green bead, although they would go on pecking at a red or chrome one.

Simply to say that an animal is pairing the neutral act of pecking at something which is both green and round, unaccompanied by any such rewarding or aversive experience, is to say nothing other than that the animal, in remembering the bead, can recall various aspects of it, including colour and shape.

He had been watching young chicks, he said, and noted how they explored their environment by pecking at crumbs or other small objects, including their own droppings, but quickly learned to distinguish edible from inedible items.

For instance the increase could have been due to the taste of the methylanthranilate itself rather than the learned association of pecking and tasting.

If later, as in the conditioned taste aversion experiment, the chick becomes mildly sick, it can only arrive at the sensible, if erroneous, conclusion that it was the bead it had pecked that made it sick if there is still some representation of the experience of pecking the bead somewhere in its brain.

All along I have been talking about the chick pecking at a chrome bead as if this was a simple, unitary experience for the animal.

I have extracted from the seamless web of the life of my chicks, pecking or avoiding beads, shaking their heads or backing away, peeping and twittering, are abstract generalizations that I have drawn from many hundreds of thousands of individual acts by individual birds that I have observed.

Scientific knowledge is in this sense public knowledge - provided always of course that all members of the public share a common agreement about what constitutes avoiding or pecking at the bead, and whether these may be defined as remembering and forgetting.

The raven landed on his wrist and took one from his palm, pecking so hard that Sam yelped and snatched his hand back.

By then it was so quiet that, except for the tune, all that could be heard was a woodpecker pecking time, his red head darting in the dazzling greenery as he added counterpoint to the rhythm dictated by the whistle.

A striped, tawny cat sat on one of her knees, while a gray bird fluttered at her finger and she made playful pecking moues at it.

Noth was in no position to challenge the Emperor or any of the stronger males in the loose pecking order above him.