Bird Love by Wenfei Tong

Author:Wenfei Tong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A barn owl feeds its oldest and largest chick a mouse.

In addition to unpredictable food, large, indivisible food also tends to increase sibling aggression. Barn owls may have anywhere from one to nine chicks, yet parents can only feed one chick at a time, and deliver food about once an hour. With chicks having to eat three to four times a day, this creates large asymmetries in hunger levels, and the youngest chick can be shoved out of the nest during a feeding skirmish. Chicks will sit on their hard-earned food to prevent their siblings from stealing any.

In contrast to delivering relatively few large food items like dead fish or game, parrot parents regurgitate food for their chicks. This allows the parents to be in more control, and to distribute food more evenly among their brood. Siblicide is much less common among parrots than among other birds with asynchronous hatching. Siblicide is also rare in glossy ibis, which feed the smallest chicks preferentially.

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