Who’s taking care of the chicks? This diary looks at some of the ways birds manage the challenging work of parenting. As there are so many species, there are many solutions to this problem — and certainly more than shown here.
Note: I love birds, but I am no photographer. So images are either those already here at Daily Kos or taken from public sites, mosly Wikipedia.
Like everything, birds manage to have all sorts of approaches. A few species go it alone: some hummingbirds in insect- and flower-rich environments will mate but then the mothers do everything on their own. As foraging is so easy, they don’t need the help.
Allen’s hummingbird, Mike’s Birds, Wikimedia Commons. Males are much more colorful.
Amazingly, there are a few species of birds that don’t just produce eggs — many of us eat unfertilized chicken eggs — but that have been known to produce fertilized eggs that pip! (Technical term: parthenogenesis).I know this is a digression, but so cool. There’s the California condor.
A captive breeding program has helped set California Condors on the path to recovery. But when biologists reviewed the family tree for the breeding program, they found a big surprise. Two chicks had DNA that linked them perfectly to their mothers but didn’t match a single male. They arose through parthenogenesis, developing from unfertilized eggs without sperm from a male. These condors are the first known case of parthenogenesis in a wild bird species where the females had access to fertile males.
Apparently this has been observed in a few other bird species, such as turkeys and pigeons and cuckoos. I suspect it happens other times as well but it’s one of those things that’s hard to know for sure unless you’ve been watching non stop.
However, although that behavior has been observed among California condors, but usually they don’t go it alone. In fact, California condors, at about age 6, start looking for a mate. The guy makes a display with his wings, the gal nods yes, and the bond is sealed.
California condors do one egg every other year, which isn’t a lot, and is one reason their numbers have been in decline. However, if something happens to the first egg before it hatches, they will often lay another. So, researchers often steal the first egg to raise it in a controlled environment and to encourage more condors.
Brood parasitism: Some birds are happy to give their eggs to others, in fact, some species only reproduce this way (“obligate brood parasitism”). Apparently there are 58 species of cuckoos in Europe and 3 species of cuckoo in the New World who always do this. The most famous is the European or common cuckoo, hence the word “cuckold.”
Common Cuckoo (a.k.a. European cuckoo) by Vogelart
How do they get away with this? The female cuckoo keeps the egg inside her for an extra 24 hours, so that it is warmer and develops faster. Then, when she lays it in a nest with other eggs in it — apparently the female can lay her egg really fast and sometimes the male cuckoo keeps watch -- the cuckoo egg usually hatches first (and no, I don’t know why the other parents don’t recognize the egg as different from the ones already laid). Pipping first gives the chick a head start.
Other members of the cuckoo family practice brood parasitism some of the time. Roadrunners, who don’t sound at all like the cuckoos you find in Europe, have sometimes left their eggs with common ravens.
Greater roadrunner, Texas
Sometimes weird things happen! An eagle brought a baby hawk to its nest, presumably as prey, but the eaglet didn’t eat it. Instead they became a family and the eaglet and the hawkette started to act like siblings.
Many species take turns caring for the chirck. The male emperor penguins down in Antarctica are celebrated for the two months in which they huddle together in the dark and cold, guarding their eggs (females, having just exhausted themselves by laying the eggs, immediately transfer the egg — alas, not always successfully — to their partners). When the eggs hatch, the males give them the chicks their first meal by regurgitating the last bit of their own supplies. The moms return and the dads go off to fish. Still, sometimes it’s possible to get pictures of an entire family together.
Emperor panguins in South Hill Island, Antarctica
What happens when a penguin doesn’t come back? Sometimes a chick will get adopted by another pair which has lost its own chick.
There’s a charming Netflix series, Penguin Town, which documents the chick raising of several sets of African penguins in a town in South Africa. The mate of one penguin, Mr. Bougainvillea, never returns, and he is forced to raise his chicks as a single parent. Because there’s longer between feedings, they grow more slowly than the other penguin chicks, but the chicks do make it to the point where they leave the bougainvillea and go to the sea.
Females always lay the eggs, but then the division of labor by gender can be very different for different species. There’s a pair of bald eagles who I sometimes watch — Jackie and Shadow — and although Jackie sits on the nest more, her mate Shadow takes on incubating duties when she takes breaks. You can observe them here (note that none of their three eggs hatched this year, so they finally gave up).
Great hornbills have a different approach. The female establishes a nest inside a tree. They wall up the hole with guano and mud and then the male brings food to her while she lays the eggs. Moreover, she loses all her feathers during this period, so she couldn’t fly anywhere if she wanted to. The female hornbill and the chicks are all without feathers until they grow in, or grow back in. Naked and imprisoned seems like a horrible arrangement to me, but the hornbills are OK with it; that’s just how it works.
A great hornbill. They eat mostly fruit. And ornithologists seem undecided on the point of the casques, although apparently other hornbills think they’re sexy.
Naturally, I need to praise the American crow, which are monogamous cooperative breeders. American crows — usually chicks from earlier clutches — stick around for a few years and help out their parents. I like this approach; as Hillary Clinton once wrote, it takes a village. A big reason that crows (and many other corvids) use this approach is because they take longer to grow up. The idea is that they are learning much more from their parents and their group.
American crow
Crows have the same brain-to-body weight ratio that humans do.
And just because birds are so cool: Gynandromorphism Emily Anthes New York Times — a birder down in Colombia
So when Hamish Spencer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, booked a bird-watching vacation in Colombia, he was hoping to spot some interesting and unusual creatures.
He got more than he bargained for. During one outing, in early January 2023, the proprietor of a local farm drew his attention to a green honeycreeper, a small songbird that is common in forests ranging from southern Mexico to Brazil.
But this particular green honeycreeper had highly unusual plumage. The left side of its body was covered in shimmering spring-green feathers, the classic coloring for females. Its right side, however, was iridescent blue, the telltale marker of a male. The bird appeared to be a bilateral gynandromorph: female on one side and male on the other.
🐦 I do a lot of other writing. A recent offering: the Crow Nickels (chronicles), a trilogy about crows who want to save birdkind from extinction: Hunters of the Feather, Scavengers of Mind and Familiars of the Flock (They’re really good! They’re really cheap! Buy and review or rate positively! And Hunters is also available on Audible!) Other stories, based on Jane Austen novels — such as The Meryton Murders — and others based on history and Greek mythology, such as Jocasta: The Mother-Wife of Oedipus, can be found here. All titles are available through Kindle Unlimited, but I only get paid if you turn the pages.
