BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Bird Sci.
Sec. Science of Birding
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbirs.2025.1677075
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Science of Birding in AfricaView all articles
Fire-Crested Alethes (Alethe castanea) Follow Humans and Bushbuck in Uganda's Budongo Forest
Provisionally accepted
Elodie Freymann1,2*
Derry Taylor3- 1University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
- 2Brown University, Providence, United States
- 3Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod, Bron, France
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This report documents four observations of a novel foraging behavior in fire-crested alethes (Alethe castanea) in the Budongo Forest Reserve of Western Uganda, where the birds were observed following humans and bushbuck, likely to flush out insect prey, diverging from their typical ant-following strategy. These observations expand our understanding of commensal relationships in tropical forest ecosystems and highlight the adaptability of bird foraging strategies.
Keywords: Fire-crested alethe, commensalism, Uganda, interspecies interaction, foraging
Received: 31 Jul 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Freymann and Taylor. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Elodie Freymann, elodie.freymann@anthro.ox.ac.uk
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