Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk — John Shaqi
Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's DeskRand, Austin Loomer
Science
Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk
Rand, Austin Loomer
Birds -- Behavior
The stories we have of them stress the utilitarian aspect of the
association; that the monkeys as they travel about through the trees
scare insects out of their hiding places and the birds, being on hand,
can snap up the insects more easily than if they had to search them out
for themselves.
The monkey bird in Africa, which is a hornbill, follows, along below
the monkeys in the lower branches of the trees. It used to be thought
this was for the fruit the monkeys dropped, but then it was found the
hornbills were insectivorous. Instead of being scavengers the hornbills
are using the monkeys to beat out their game for them.
Hamba Kerah, the slave of the monkeys, is what the Malays of Borneo
call the racket-tailed drongo. This is from its habit of stationing
itself behind a band of monkeys traveling through the forest. But Mr.
Ridley, who watched them, decided it was the other way around; the
monkeys, unwittingly of course, were working for the drongo, acting as
beaters to drive out the insects which the bird snapped up in the air.
In the Philippines it is "the sentinel of the monkey" that is applied
to the fairy bluebird. The bluebird seldom associates with its own
kind, but is almost invariably associated with a band of crab-eating
macaques. But here again it seems the monkeys are acting as beaters for
the bird, driving out insects.
This is a sort of unconscious co-operation one finds in the bird world.
One animal helps out another without being aware of it. Birds are ever
ready to profit by such behavior, and when it proves of enough benefit,
the habit can become usual for the species, as in the cowbird-cow
relationship, or indispensable as with the oxpecker-hoofed-animal
association.
BIRD-MADE INCUBATORS
[Illustration]
Incubators as we know them on chicken farms are electrical gadgets with
thermostats to control the temperature, or at least with oil lamps
to supply the heat necessary for the young chick in the egg to grow.
Naturally we wouldn't expect anything so artificial as this in the bird
world, but there is one group of birds that does not brood its eggs but
has employed another method of incubating.
The birds that do this are fowl-like birds of the Australasian area.
They are variously called "mound builders" from the nest mound they
construct, "megapodes" from the large size of their scratching feet, or
bush turkeys, presumably from their edible qualities. These birds bury
their eggs and leave them thus to hatch without any brooding by the
bird. The birds have adapted their habits to two different sources of
natural heat. On some of the Pacific islands there is local volcanism
making the sand warm. To such places the birds come to bury their eggs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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