17 September 2024: Day 11, WINGS Spain in Autumn. On the plains east of Seville, then our tour concludes at midday in Seville. Click on right here to see (usually) the place I’m right this moment. NOTE: This text was written in August.
As we speak is our final birding day in Spain and I’ve already seen 4 hoopoes.
Completely unmistakable orange chicken with zebra-striped wings, a Chinese language fan of a crest (often held closed, however typically raised simply after touchdown), and a rapier of a invoice. Favors semiopen habitats comparable to heathland, farmland, orchards, grassy lawns, the place it feeds on the bottom, probing with its lengthy invoice for bugs
Hoopoes are massive in my creativeness — maybe due to their crests — however they’re solely the scale of American robins although their form could be very completely different. This video of captive hoopoes in Dubai reveals their measurement relative to a human hand.
Hoopoes had been named for his or her track …
… and are so eye-catching that people have each revered and feared them. Hoopoes had been sacred in Historical Egypt and a logo of advantage in Persia but harbingers of battle in Scandanavia and foreshadowers of demise in Estonia. Was it the hoopoe’s conduct that prompted these opinions?
Hoopoes nest in cavities the place the feminine lays 2-12 eggs that hatch 24 hours aside within the order they had been laid. The nestlings can subsequently vary in age from 1 to 12+ days previous however the youngest don’t final lengthy.
Early warning, people. Some grotesque information forward.
A March report at Science.org describes how researchers in Granada Province noticed a grotesque conduct in hoopoe households that’s fairly uncommon amongst birds.
Within the first of two research, Juan José Soler on the Experimental Station of Arid Zones in Spain confirmed that “hoopoe moms incessantly feed youthful chicks to older chicks. And he suspected that hoopoe moms laid additional eggs with the intention of utilizing the hatchlings as meals.”
The second examine bore this out. In settings the place meals was plentiful throughout egg laying feminine hoopoes laid extra eggs and later used the youngest chicks as meals for the older ones. Curiously, nests with excessive cannibalism fledged extra chicks that these with out.
Past the strangeness (dare I say horror?) of cannibalism supplied by one’s mom is the truth that hoopoes don’t have beaks and claws geared up to kill small birds. “That could be why, says Soler, mom hoopoes typically seize the unfortunate chick and shove it into the mouth of an older chick, which swallows it entire.” — Science.org.: Watch Out! This colourful chicken raises a nest of cannibals.
This conduct could sound acquainted to these of you who keep in mind the Pitt peregrine mom nicknamed Hope, 2016-2019. Each spring Hope killed and ate one or two of her chicks and supplied them as meals to the older chicks. Now that I do know of the hoopoe’s uncommon conduct, maybe Hope ought to have been named Hoopoe.
Learn extra concerning the research at Science.org.: Watch Out! This colourful chicken raises a nest of cannibals.
p.s. Regardless of the strangeness I nonetheless like hoopoes.
