SCIENCE LAB SCENICS : FLOCKING TOGETHER

'' Songbird relationships sound like friendship '' : True friends are there for each other, sometimes offering emotional support or helping each other move.

And if you're a superb starling - a flamboyant, chattering songbird native to the African savanna - it means stuffing bugs down the throat of your friends' offspring, expecting they'll eventually do the same for yours.

Scientists have long known that social animals usually put blood relatives first. But for a story published in the journal Nature, researchers crunched two decades of field data to show that unrelated members of a superb starling flock often help each other raise chicks, trading assistance to one another over years.

'' We think that these reciprocal helping relationships are a way to build ties,'' said Dustin Rubenstein, a professor of ecology at Columbia University in New York and an author of the paper.

Dr. Rubenstein's lab has recorded thousands of interactions between the chattering birds and collected DNA to examine genetic relationships.

When Alexis Earll, then a graduate student, studied the data, she and her colleagues weren't shocked to see that birds largely helped relatives, the way an aunt or uncle may swoop in to give parents a break.

But they also found that starlings also helped nonrelatives, including when they might have helped family instead.

And they also found that individual birds that helped nonrelatives later had their good deeds repaid, sometimes repeatedly.

'' The starlings are consistently investing in the same preferred social partners over their lives,'' said Dr. Earll, now a biologist at Cornell University in upstate New York.

'' To me that sounds like friendship.''

The World Students Society Asher Elbein.