The Secret Life of Birds by Colin Tudge

Author:Colin Tudge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141962108
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-12-03T16:00:00+00:00

From the deep south again are the sheathbills, which look a bit like scruffy white chickens but in truth are skuas in chickens’ clothing. They are bold, unfazed by humans, and take bits of whales from around the whaling stations. In due season they gorge on the placentae and stillborns of breeding seals, as farmland crows may do at lambing time. At other times they search among the seaweed for invertebrates. But pairs also build their nests close to penguins and then can be serious predators, stealing eggs and chicks or – skua-like – harassing parent penguins to regurgitate the food they have brought for their chicks, and feeding it to their own chicks. After fledging the young pick up debris from the beach and are then known as ‘shitehawks’ – as indeed are Black Kites in India and South Africa. More stinkers. But sheathbills are clean birds. They spend a lot of time preening.

There are pirates in the tropics too – notably the five species of frigatebirds which between them patrol the equatorial oceans all around the world on their long, black scimitar wings. Frigatebirds are basically fishers, scooping prey from the surface, but are also notorious buccaneers, dressed for the part in ragged black and occasional flashes of gaudy, pillaging food from other seabirds on the wing and also their nesting material.

Finally, animal flesh is accompanied by all kinds of debris – spines, shells, fur, feathers, bones – which is not digestible. Many birds, within their crops, parcel all this rubbish into neat ‘pellets’, which they then regurgitate. Owls are best known for this, feeding as so many of them do on mice and voles with their small and vicious bones. But raptors and gulls often make pellets too, and they have also been recorded in flycatchers, crows, herons, sandpipers, kingfishers, barbets, rails, and even honeyeaters – which mainly eat nectar but also arthropods. Pellets offer a grand opportunity for the field zoologist to see what the birds have been eating, which often is all but impossible to observe directly. Field studies are difficult and naturalists need all the help they can get.

All in all, it is hard to make a living by eating other animals. So why not eat plants?

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