Читать книгу Stray Feathers From a Bird Man's Desk - Austin Loomer Rand - Страница 14

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The crocodile bird, or Egyptian plover, has enjoyed a dubious publicity because of its reputed habit of entering, and coming out of, crocodile mouths. As Herodotus put it, the crocodile's mouth is infested with leeches, and when the crocodile comes out of the water it lies with its mouth open facing the western breeze. Then the crocodile bird goes into the crocodile's mouth and devours the leeches, to the gratification of the crocodile, who is careful not to harm the bird. Though there are some more recent observations corroborating this, modern observers who have had abundant opportunity have watched for this behavior and have not seen it.

As one authority on African birds puts it, it is evidently not an everyday occurrence.

But the crocodile bird has other habits that are just as bizarre and interesting. It lives along the sandy shores of African rivers, and when it lays its clutch of two to four eggs these are buried in the sand so there is no sign of them aboveground. The bird sits on top of this spot. A. L. Butler, who studied this bird in the Sudan, thought that the sand might be scraped away from the eggs and the eggs brooded in normal fashion by night. The young birds are very precocial, and feed themselves on tiny insects, but they follow the parent. When danger threatens the young squat motionless in some depression. The toe mark of a hippopotamus is a favorite place. Then the old bird, with her bill, throws sand over the young until they may be completely covered. Not only does this happen when the birds are very small, but continues up until the time the birds can fly. Dr. W. Serle in Sierra Leone once saw a crocodile bird burying something and found the disturbed spot fairly easily, as recent rain had beaten the sand beach smooth and hard; a fully fledged young was unearthed. It squatted motionless until prodded from behind, then it ran swiftly, rose, and flew away strongly.

The burying is not only protection from immediate enemies; A. L. Butler believed it was normal for the young when not feeding to be buried for safety or as protection from the burning sun. For a further protection from the sun the parent moistens the sand by regurgitating water over it.

Butler on one occasion saw a crocodile bird drink at the water's edge, run up onto a sand beach, regurgitate water, then settle to brood. Butler marked the spot, went to it, and, scraping away the dampened sand, found a tiny chick about one inch below the surface.

This covering of the eggs by the parent is not unique in the bird world. The pied-billed grebe of North America also does this. When disturbed at the nest the incubating bird has been seen to use quick pecking motions to draw material from the edge of the nest over the eggs. Instead of leaving the eggs exposed the nest simply looks like a heap of trash and may thus escape the attention of a predator. It used to be thought that this grebe used to incubate only at night, leaving the eggs covered during the day to be incubated by the heat from the sun and from the decaying vegetation of the nest. However, recent studies have shown this is not the case, and protection by concealment seems to be the main advantage of this behavior.

Yet another species of quite a different group, the eider duck, covers its eggs on leaving them. The eider's nest is characterized by a blanket of down, plucked from the breast of the bird, and when the female has time, when she leaves the nest she pulls the edges of the down blanket over the eggs, perhaps for concealment, perhaps for the sake of the down's insulating properties, keeping the eggs warm in a northern climate during the parent's absence.

Here we have covering of eggs for what seems to be very different purposes: to keep the eggs cool; to keep them warm; and to hide them from view.