Smart Birds Learned How To Operate Automatic Doors

Some clever swallows learned how to trigger a motion detector above doors in a parking garage so they could fly in and out at will. A video of the birds was uploaded to YouTube by Grant Hughes.

According to Hughes, the doors were added when the garage was converted into a campus bike center at the University of Victoria in Canada. The nesting birds would have been trapped inside, but figured out that flying in a circle in front of the door activated the sensor that opened the doors.

This isn't the first recorded instance of swallows figuring out how to use automatic doors. A pair of barn swallows nested inside a lumberyard entryway at a Home Depot in Minnesota for years. The swallows entered and exited at their leisure by swooping in front of the motion detector above the doors.

Watch the video of swallows in the bike center below: