The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

We love our stinky kids

The story about the smelly babies isn't true. Birds don't reject their nestlings if people have handled them and gotten human scent all over them. Most birds can't smell much, anyway. (But don't say this around a vulture. Or a kiwi. Or a fulmar.)

 I don't know how this story got started, but I certainly heard it  when I was a kid. Somehow it had an appalling plausibility –  our very touch turns innocent babies to pariahs.

(Not the actual baby robins I'm talking about.)

Fortunately for three small birds I met recently, it's nonsense. These robin nestlings fell out of their nest on a windy morning. They hit the sidewalk uninjured, and a kind passer-by picked them up (intelligently noting the address) and took them to the nearest animal shelter. The shelter had the expertise, and the feeding formula, to take care of the young birds. But they knew the best upbringing for robins comes from robins. They had eight million things to do besides feeding screaming baby robins every 20 minutes. A wildlife rescue organization would try to get the robins back to their parents.

 I'd been told that the best thing to do for uninjured baby birds is to get them back up in their nest, or near their nest, or at least up in the branches of their tree out of cat-reach, and let their parents take care of them. I believed it. But I had never done it. (What if it were as false as the human-stink story?)

We inspected the site. With the address, we could identify the home tree, but it was leafy and no nest could be seen. Besides, that nest was clearly a slipshod dealio that baby robins fell out of in a high wind, a flimsy sieve, a deathtrap. We'd have to rig up a substitute. The worrying part was that there didn't seem to be any robins there. The parents were supposed to be hanging around calling for their children. But no. No one was around but blackbirds. By this time the babies had been away most of the day. Had the parents given up? 

 We thought we'd try anyway, so we went to get the chicks. They were past the naked blob stage, into the partially-feathered lump stage. They were starting to have robin faces. Maybe a week from fledging, they were correctly-behaved bird children. They alternated between gaping and screeching, twittering softly, and squatting silent and motionless like little lumps of ugly. The shelter gave them a feeding, which would last them in case their parents never returned and we had to bring them back.

Back at the tree, we scanned for robins. Nothing. Using a ladder, we wired a plastic tub into the branches, making sure it wouldn't tip in the wind like certain shoddy constructions. We'd made drainage holes so liquid couldn't collect in it. That was the nest. The shelter staff had made a nice lining with pine needles and bits of a feather duster. While the wiring took place, the nestlings hunkered low inside, pretending not to exist.  

 We took the ladder away and looked around. No robins. We peered around with binoculars. Nothing but blackbirds. We crossed the street and sat on a bench and looked. No robins. So we got in the car and drove away, but then came back, and parked across the street, taking advantage of robins' inability to read license plates or tell a Delorean from a Hupmobile. We stayed in the car. Blackbirds flew over the tree, perched on a wire above the tree, and squeaked at other blackbirds, but there were no robins.  

 Until suddenly there was a silent robin in the tree next to the nest tree. With something in its bill. It silently dived into the nest tree. It had been 16 minutes since we walked away from the tree.

To be sure it was true, we walked down the other side of the street, crossed, and casually walked under the tree, glancing up for just a second as we did. An adult robin was perched – silently – two feet from the nest tub.

 It makes sense that parent birds would approach the nest without making giveaway sounds, but I'm still amazed that they so quickly detected that their kids were back (in a nearby location, with a new pre-fab house) and resumed food deliveries.

 Mostly, I'm delighted that they overlooked the fact that the kids must have reeked of rescuer stink.

 

Follow-up:

I went by the nest tree about two weeks after we put it up. Since the young robins had been about a week from fledging, I wasn't worried about disturbing things. Everything was the same. The nest was still up there, if you looked, and no robins were in sight. I was relieved that the plastic nest hadn't been distubed.

Going back later to remove the nest, I saw that the tree had been heavily pruned since the last visit. It was no longer a thickly-leaved place where you could hide a nest. Whoever had pruned the tree had carefully left the plastic nest. It was a touching gesture, although the nest was now too exposed to be safe. I was very glad that the pruning had happened after the babies had fledged. I took the nest down and examined the lining. It appeared well used.

Babies are often brought into rescue centers when trees being pruned or felled turn out to have nests -- baby birds, squirrel pups, dragonets.* It's better to prune out of nesting season.

Early this morning, I went back to look for young robins, and saw this squirt in the little park across the street. The spots on the feathers show that this bird fledged this year and hasn't gone through the preformative molt yet -- that it's just a child.

It could be some other robins' child, but it's the right age and the right place to be one of the three rescued fledglings.

 

(*Okay, probably not dragonets.)

 

Lucky swan, secret sorrow

Earlier this year, a wildlife rescue center took in a mute swan (Cygnus olor).

Mute swans aren't native birds. In North American we have tundra swans, whooper swans, and trumpeter swans. Some people buy mute swans, the lovely birds of classic European imagery, and place them on ornamental water to make it even more ornamental. Sometimes the swans go wild, move to wilder waters, raise families there. Because they're not native, they don't have the same legal protections, and because they're not native, some people disapprove of them. (It's said that they're hard on aquatic vegetation and ecosystems.)

But this swan wasn't feral. He dwelled on ornamental water where he had been placed, only now he was very sick and looked like he might stop dwelling at any moment. He was too weak to stand, a pancaked fowl.

Since he was a private bird, he might have gone to a private veterinarian, but vets who see swans are rare, and the wildlife center has waterfowl experience. The swan was lucky.
 
Once I found a sick bird on a beach. We were in an unfamiliar town, but I eventually got a number for a wildlife rescue center. “I found a bird...” I began, but a bored voice interrupted. “We only take native species,” it said. “You
probably have a starling. We don't take them.”

“Actually I think it's a marbled godwit.”

“Oh!” the nativist cried in sudden interest. “Bring it right in!”

But most wildlife centers take some non-native species. They may not be delighted, but they won't turn you and your bedraggled find away from their door.

The swan had been admitted, and treated, and was feeling a lot better. He could stand now. His benefactors had gone on the buddy system – they didn't go alone into his pen.

Swans are big. And grumpy. Not only do they hiss and bite, but with their wings they can hit very hard, so hard that it is said they can break human bones. People are charmed by the fact that swans are devoted spouses and parents, but one way swans express that is by beating up anyone who comes too close to their family.

Three of the most common reactions to seeing a swan can be summarized as:

    “Oh look, how beautiful!”
    “Those things can break your arm.”
    “What is that, a pelican?”

I like to summarize three swan reactions as:

    “Yes, you may admire my beauty from a great distance.”
    “Not as long as you stay a great distance away.” 
    “A pelican? I'm gonna come over there and break your arm.”



No one wanted to mix it up with rescue swan now that he had his strength back. Perhaps he was ready to be returned to his ornamental water. But there was a problem. He had lost weight and he wasn't gaining it back. Despite his recovery, he wasn't eating well.

They discussed his case at morning rounds. What was going on with him? Someone asked if he had a mate. Yes, a mate and cygnets too. Ah. He was lonesome for his family. Treatment plan: reunion.

(This shows a good understanding of different species. You wouldn't ask this question about a male peacock or a male hummingbird, because they aren't family men.)

The swan missed his family. To me it also seems possible that he worried about them. I doubt a swan envisions particular scenarios – monstrous humans kidnapping his wife, falcons grabbing his children – but possibly this swan envisioned his family alone, without him on guard, and he wanted to be back defending them. Taking names and breaking arms.

 


 

Beak outlook

In Fort Jackson, Louisiana, the little bird having the oil washed off was struggling passionately. I couldn't figure out what it was. Not a gull, not a tern – could it be a rail? No, surely not. I was told it was a black skimmer.

 
But I've seen skimmers (Rynchops niger). They don't look like that. I was told it was a young one. Skimmers don't hatch with those bizarre long bills with the lower mandible longer than the upper. (How would that fit in an egg?)

Then I remembered other bird species in which little snub bills of the chicks give hardly any clue to the crazy big bills they'll have as adults.

Chicks' bills have to fit in the egg, and they have to be used to get out of the egg. After they hatch, there's time for bills to elongate or bulk up, to curve down or up, or to acquire interesting attachments if necessary.

The clean little skimmer was moved to the rinse table, where it continued to resist. You rinse my wing, I'll stamp on your hand! Stop or I'll I bite you! There, I bit you! I might do it again! Finally they wrapped the defiant creature in a towel and hustled it off to the drying room. (Many birds never seem to think of stabbing people in the eye with their bills. Instead they bite. You don't want to be bitten by an eagle or a swan, but when an egret bites you, it's okay. They don't have the leverage.)

I went looking for video of birds in which the chicks have to go through some serious bill growth to catch up to their parents. I found these spoonbills (Platalea ajaja) at Animal Kingdom in Orlando.

Also this shoebill (Balaeniceps rex) family at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. The chick doesn't have the big bill yet, but it has the slow serious demeanor you need to carry off a giant smiley proboscis.

There's an unsettling video from a camera inside a trumpeter hornbill (Bycanistes bucinator) nest. Trumpeter hornbills, like some other hornbills, have a system in which the married female seals herself into a nest cavity with an adobe of her own devising (mud, fruit pulp, and bird dung, if you want the recipe). She leaves just a small opening through which food can be passed.

Once immured, she lays eggs. In fact, as long as she's in there, and not flying around, she molts her feathers. Her devoted spouse may help her build the wall. The advantage is thought to be that this keeps their eggs, and then chicks, safe from predators, and perhaps from other hornbills.

Time passes, the eggs hatch into revolting little hornbills, and the male feeds them all. When it gets simply too crowded in the nest cavity, the mother breaks herself out.

In this video of captive breeding, the hornbill cam shows not-dressed-for-company mother and repulsive not-dressed-at-all child in the nest. At the far end is the opening, and there is much excitement and whining as the devoted father starts passing snacks in to his wife, who feeds them to their horrifying child. Who looks even more disgusting with banana oozing out of the corner of its bill – but notice what a normal-looking bill it is.

Some birds go with a cuter look.
Even if you think they're adorable, though, it's more polite not to stare and talk about whether chicks have their parent's nose. You might embarrass them. They might get all shy.

Oh, here's what a grown-up skimmer's bill is good for. For this to work out, the water should be clean.

Mama could use a little downtime

Researchers in the Serengeti were quantifying the hunting behavior of female cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus). They measured the proportion of the day spent hunting, hunts started per hour, proportion of hunts which were successful, and time to complete a hunt. They recorded the age of the cheetahs' cubs if any, and how her hunting behavior changed with the age of the cubs.

Cheetahs with no cubs don't have to spend as much time hunting. Once they have cubs in the lair or just out of the lair, they have to spend more time hunting to feed those children.

But there's another factor that goes into time spent hunting. I will remind you that cheetahs don't pair up, so these female cheetahs are single ladies with no babysitters and they can't even get their own mothers to help.

The cheetahs whose behavior confounded the measurement of hunting time had young cubs, nursing but out of the lair. Fluffy, playful, delightful cubs full of nonstop energy, with exciting new teeth.

When their mothers hunted these cubs either stayed behind or followed her for a short distance. Then they would sit and watch their mother advancing toward the prey, not coming forward unless she called them (to share the gazelle she'd just caught, say). Cubs know how to do this. They watch carefully as their mother stalks the prey.

A cat stalking its prey often creeps forward, stops and crouches in place for a while, creeps forward some more when the prey isn't looking, stops again, and so forth. The researchers timed all this. To their surprise, the mother cheetahs were also taking naps. Creep, creep, crouch, snooze, creep, creep, crouch, snooze. Sometimes they'd sleep for ten minutes at a time in the middle of a stalk. Presumably, the cubs, lacking binoculars, just thought their mother was being extra sneaky.

I think the researchers sympathized. “Freed of nursing attempts and being played upon, a mother had a chance to close her eyes,” wrote T. M. Caro in Cheetahs of the Serengeti. “Prey often wandered off as a consequence...”

Any caretaker of youth can guess how those cheetahs feel. “I would kill for a nap. A nap and a glass of wine. A nap and a glass of wine without being chewed on and FIVE MINUTES CONVERSATION ABOUT SOMETHING BESIDES MR. IMPALAHEAD.”

Whatcha got in the barrel, George?

According to the newspaper Daffy Duck reads, “The TASMANIAN DEVIL is a powerful, vicious, evil-tempered brute... hungry at all times... it will eat anything but is especially fond of wild duck.”

In creating the character of Taz, Warner Brothers was building on precedent. The person who described the Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisi) for science, in 1807, surveyor/naturalist George Harris, told the world how ferocious, fiendish, savage -- “uncontrollably wild” -- devils were.

He wrote, “They bite frequently and snarl and bark loudly.”

But here's how he knew. He had two devils. He kept them in a barrel. Chained together. They are nocturnal, and slept all day, while Harris was writing insulting things about them. They woke up when it got dark and discovered they were still chained together in a barrel. They fought and shrieked all night, when Harris probably planned to sleep. Perhaps he felt that if he had been chained to another guy, in a barrel, he would have remained quiet and sweet.

Tasmanian devils still have a terrible reputation. People call them vicious and impossible to tame. But Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, where I first learned about Harris and his barrel, also mentions a person who had two pet devils whom he leashed and took for walks. And there was no trail of bloody bodies behind them, even when he took them to Melbourne.

Others say they are “delightful and affectionate pets.” When not chained in a barrel. It's easy to find video of devils scampering across verandahs, hanging from sleeves like Jack Russell terriers, or in one remarkable clip, nestling in a zookeeper's arms and being persuaded to relax her pouch to reveal two infant devils (imps?) clinging blindly to her nipples.

It's true that Tasmanian devils yell a lot, specializing in a noise that's partly screaming and partly retching. Carrying on at night is how  they got called devils in the first place. They are not as timid as people like wild animals to be.
 
They hold an ecological niche—that of a small scavenging carnivore—that gets bad press even without the shrieking at night and George Harris slandering them. (Also: chicken-snatchers.) Essentially they are marsupial wolverines. And you know how people talk  about wolverines (Gulo gulo). For some reason people enjoy the idea of a small demonic animal and promote the legend of its savagery.

I once met two hand-raised wolverines. The minute they saw you they rushed up scrabbling over each other to lick your hands (and see if you had been nice enough to bring snacks). Like puppies, they loved to be rubbed and scratched. I'd love to meet devils raised that way, with affection. And no barrel.

The Dangerous Lives of Treeshrews

I was reading Tupai: A Field Study of Bornean Treeshrews by Louise H. Emmons because that is the kind of thing I like, and learned about the absentee maternal system found in some treeshrew species.

First I should say that treeshrews are the same as tree shrews, and the closing up of the word is probably meant to indicate that they don't really live in trees and they're not really shrews. This is a case of TC, Taxonomic Correctness, like the argument that you should call a starfish a sea star because it's not really a fish. Oh please. But a big issue about treeshrews is whether they're descended from very primitive primates and so are our distant cousins, or whether the connection goes further back so that the primates and the treeshrews are both descended from the clade Euarchonta, making them even more distant cousins. I have no opinion on this.

In the absentee maternal system the mother treeshrew builds two nests (yeah, in trees). They are far apart. She puts her babies in one and she sleeps in the other one when she's not racing around snuffling through the leaf litter and catching bugs. Every other day she secretly visits the babies, taking a different route each time, and nurses them. When she's not there the babies lie still and don't make a sound. If an intrepid wildlife biologist like Louise H. Emmons takes a baby out of the nest, it lies silently in her hand with its eyes closed.

One day when they are old enough the mother treeshrew drops by as usual, but instead of just nursing them she takes them out and shows them Borneo. Here's a bug, here's a little trail, here's what you do when you hear a scary noise -- there's another bug! Let me see you grab it! She brings them with her on her rounds and protects them while they learn the business of treeshrewing.

According to a report from the wild, the babies were "shaky" the first time they came out of the nest hole.

The reason treeshrews do this has to be that it makes it much less likely that predators will find the nest and eat the babies by observing the mother. (That's the sort of creepy trick that jays and crows do, for example.) And obviously it's very convenient for the mother treeshrew. Which makes me lean toward the idea that treeshrews aren't primates – what baby primate holds that still for that long?

Like other wildlife biologists who write books for general audiences, Louise H. Emmons tries to find a balance between the stuff working scientists mostly do, and the stuff that people are actually interested in hearing about. Most of the work of wildlife biology doesn't involve playing peekaboo with baby gorillas, swimming with whale sharks, or filming hippo hijinks. It involves data sets. Perhaps Emmons leans too far in the direction of hard science, because her best story was walled up alive in an appendix. (I read appendices so you don't have to. Or at least I skim them.)

In Appendix 1, Emmons explains why a trapping data set is incomplete.

In the January trapping period, a group of elephants went through the study area, systematically destroying man-made objects (rain gauges, signs, trail markers, etc.). They stomped on seven baited traps but interestingly did not step on one that contained a treeshrew, while flattening the two on each side (trapping in January was curtailed, and this month is excluded from most data).

The elephants spared the tiny prisoner! Of course I think they did it because they felt compassion for the treeshrew, but I realize that there is also a compelling quality to  the explanation that they did it because they didn't want to get their feet sticky.

Behold this child

My sister took this photograph. (Click on it for a better look.) It shows Sky, a Thoroughbred mare, and her first foal. The foal's about 5 minutes old.

Because it was her first foal, Sky had no idea what was happening when she went into labor. First she felt bad, and then she felt really bad, and it hurt a lot, and it went on and on. That's a big foal, and labor was difficult. The foal got stuck twice, even with two people pulling on it.

In the picture, Sky is astonished and thrilled. A baby! There's a baby! It's her baby! Sky, like a lot of mares, always liked foals, but could never get her hands on one, so to speak. Their mothers wouldn't let other mares near them until they were older.

My sister, Dr. Sarah McCarthy, is an equine veterinarian, and she helped me decode Sky's expression. That wide eye means just what you think. It's true Sky's glancing at the camera, but that's not why her eye's so big. She's wide-eyed with amazement. A child of her own has magically appeared in front of her (and just as she was getting over the worst colic ever). As described in Becoming A Tiger, some first-time mare mothers have been known to get up from the straw and walk away, not having any idea that there's a baby horse in the vicinity. My sister knows of cases where a mare has to be grabbed as she walks away, led back, and shown the foal she'd just given birth to. Wow! Look, a baby! Wow!

Sky's ears are straight up, which shows excitement and attention. Her neck is stretched out in eagerness. Also, and this is harder for a non-horse person like me to notice, Sky's lips are protruded and her nostrils are flared, as she drinks in the delightful smell of her new child. She's beside herself with joy and surprise.

I met Sky's chestnut filly when she was 5 days old, racing around, doing little kicks and leaps, followed every moment by the still rapturous but much calmer Sky.

Next time Sky goes into labor, she may suspect what's coming. My sister tells me that Rosie, one of her other horses, had definitely figured it out by the time of her 3rd foal. Alerted by a 3 a.m. phone call that Rosie's water had broken, she went down to the stall. As soon as Rosie saw my sister she began to nicker tenderly as a mare does to a foal. It was as if a woman in labor greeted her obstetrician's arrival by saying, “Oh, who's the best little baby in the world?”

[This photograph is copyright by Sarah McCarthy and may not be used without her permission. You may not, for example, put it up on a LOL cats site, with the horse on the left captioned I CAN HAZ FOAL? and the horse on the right captioned CALL ME CHEEZBURGER.]