Some tiny birds take bold risks to gather a beakful of hair for their nests. Titmice have been spotted dive-bombing cats, alighting on dozing predators’ backs and plucking strands of hair from people’s heads. Now, there’s a term for the unusual behavior: kleptotrichy. Derived from the Greek words for “to steal” and “hair,” kleptotrichy has rarely been described by scientists, but dozens of YouTube videos capture the behavior, researchers report online July 27 in Ecology.
