Two Stories about Birds
These are pretty interesting/funny stories, I found.
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Posted AT 7:16 PM EST ON 05/03/07
BERLIN — Three teenagers may face a hefty fine if a court decides their festive firecrackers outside an eastern German farm scared the libido right out of an ostrich named Gustav.
Rico Gabel, a farmer in Lohsa, northeast of Dresden, is claiming about $7,600 in damages for the alleged antics on Dec. 27 and Dec. 29, 2005, by the three teens.
The farmer claims that fireworks set off by the boys made the previously lustful Gustav both apathetic and depressed, and thus unable to perform for six months with his two female breeding partners, according to the lawsuit.
Before Gustav regained his sex drive in the second half of the year, the farmer estimates he lost out on 14 ostrich offspring — worth more than $540 each.
The suit is to be heard March 12 in a regional court in nearby Bautzen, the court said Monday. The teens' identities were not released.
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Posted AT 5:03 PM EST ON 05/03/07
WASHINGTON — Raise my kids, or else!
People have long wondered how cowbirds can get away with leaving their eggs in the nests of other species, who then raise the baby cowbirds. Why don't the hosts just toss the strange eggs out?
Now researchers seem to have an answer — if the host birds reject the strange eggs, the cowbirds come back and trash the place.
The so-called “Mafia behaviour,” by brown-headed cowbirds is reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It's the female cowbirds who are running the mafia racket at our study site,” Jeffrey Hoover, of the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Illinois Natural History Survey, said in a statement.
“Our study shows many of them returned and ransacked the nest when we removed the parasitic egg,” he explained.
Dr. Hoover and Scott Robinson of the Florida museum studied cowbirds over four seasons in the Cache Rover watershed in southern Illinois.
While cowbirds leave their eggs in many other birds nests, the researchers focused on warblers in the study because warblers usually accept and raise cowbird eggs.
To see what would happen, Dr. Hoover and Dr. Robinson watched where the cowbirds left eggs in warbler nests, and then removed some of them.
They found that 56 per cent of the nests where cowbird eggs were removed were later ransacked.
They also found evidence of what they called 'farming' behaviour,' in which cowbirds destroyed a nest to force the host bird to build another. The cowbird then synchronized its egg laying with the hosts' ‘renest' attempt.
“Cowbirds parasitized 85 per cent of the renests, which is strong supporting evidence for both farming and mafia behaviour,” Dr. Hoover said.
The research was supported by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
© Copyright 2007 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
posted by X at 7:35 p.m.
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