Innovative Behaviour Is Associated With Increased Collision Incidence in Birds

Collisions with anthropogenic structures kill billions of birds annually, yet risk factors remain poorly understood. Behavioural plasticity generally increases survival in changing environments, but its protective effects may be context-dependent. We assessed the link between behavioural innovation, a proxy for plasticity and collision incidence across 854 species and 259,873 lethal collision events involving buildings, communication towers and wind turbines. Overall, we found a significant positive residual correlation between innovation rate and collision incidence, independent of ecological covariates and phylogenetic relationships. However, this relationship was hazard-specific: innovativeness positively correlated with building collisions but showed no relationship with communication towers or wind turbines. Furthermore, collision risk was driven by food-related rather than technical innovations. Rather than demonstrating a universal mortality cost of cognitive capacity, our results suggest that opportunistic foraging behaviours may create ecological traps in structurally dense environments. Ultimately, behavioural plasticity can drive fitness consequences, but this risk is fundamentally context-dependent.