Evolution and the Study of Animal Behavior

      This is my dog Pepper. My husband jokes that she's either the best cat we'll ever own, or the worst dog. She was found living on the streets with a pack of four other dogs before we adopted her and still I think she'd die if she had to hunt to survive. I've grown up with dogs my whole life and had never considered that this tiny afraid creature could have been specially bred from the same common ancestor as my sister's pit bull terrier 14,000 years ago. This isn't to say that I didn't know about the theory of evolution or that I hadn't studied natural and artificial selection; just that I guess I never gave it much thought. Another thing I found interesting that I 

had never considered is that mating behavior was heritable. It made complete sense once I stopped to think about it. The birds that sexy dance will have more chances to mate and pass on their sexy dancing genes than birds that just can't groove. Likewise, Karma ----------> 

would probably never get the chance to pass on this lovely face, (you know, even if we hadn't fixed him) because it's a face only my sister could love. 

     While we're on the topic of love, doesn't it seem like evolutionary biologists have a thing for birds? Maybe it's just that they're pretty. Maybe it is because they can fly all over and they like to migrate, or maybe it stemmed from Darwin and his Galapagos finches, but while reading about the great tit birds and their exploratory behaviors I realized that I've probably read as much about birds in evolution and natural selection as I have all other animals combined. In Darwin's case, he found something awesome and had to study it. In the research featured in our textbook, Animal Behavior- Concepts, Methods and Applications, it mentioned the widespread distribution and ease of determining relatedness because the birds often used artificial nesting boxes. This allowed them to specially select and breed two lineages of great tits, one that was brave and one that was four times more timid generations later, ultimately showing that the exploratory behaviors they exhibited were heritable which is super cool. My question is, however; why not hamsters or chameleons?