Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's DeskRand, Austin Loomer
Science
Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk
Rand, Austin Loomer
Birds -- Behavior
CLIFF DWELLERS, TOO Perhaps it would not be proper to consider a colony
of bank swallows, each with a separate burrow in the same small cut
bank and roofed with the same few square yards of turf of mother earth,
as a real apartment house of cliff dwellers. But the term has been used
in connection with a West Indian woodpecker, where a dozen pairs were
nesting in a single dead tree, and "the trunk was a veritable apartment
house." A similar situation exists with the naked-faced barbet of West
Africa. This bird too makes a hole in a dead tree for its nest, like a
woodpecker, and colonies of thirty to fifty birds may be found nesting
in a single dead tree, while other dead trees nearby, apparently
equally suitable, are untenanted. Colonies of hundreds of nests of
cliff swallows, the nests touching and overlapping, may be under the
eaves of a single barn, or as they used to be and some still are, on
the sheltered side of a cliff. But as these birds had nothing to do
with the making of the roof, perhaps these too do not deserve to be
rated as apartment houses.
In southern South America there is a monk parakeet that makes a real
tenement. It nests colonially in treetops, and the nests of sticks are
placed so close together that they merge and form a single mass, up to
nine feet across, in which each parakeet has its own nest. Similar to
this is the palm chat. This West Indian bird is small and thrush-sized,
dull in color, brownish with a streaked breast, nothing remarkable to
look at, but it carries amazingly large sticks, little thinner than a
lead pencil and as much as two feet and more long up to the top of a
palm tree, and there it makes its bulky community nest.
BUILD NESTS CO-OPERATIVELY These stick nests, which may be four feet
and more across, are conspicuous and regular features of the landscape
in Hispaniola. The colony consists of four to eight pairs of birds,
and each has its own apartment in the bulky structure, and its own
passageway to the outside. But in the parts of the community nests that
hold the individual nests together and cover them there are roughly
defined passages running through the interlacing twigs of the top of
the nest so that the birds can creep about under cover. Apparently some
of the work is carried on in common, for as many as half a dozen birds
may be working close together, pulling and twisting twigs more firmly
into place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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