Showing posts with label chicks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chicks. Show all posts

Birds Know Who is Related to Them

Zoology shows men scorn their stepsons, like birds.
It is common knowledge that cuckoos "dump" their eggs in other birds' nests to put the responsibility of bringing up cuckoo chicks to strangers. It appeared that birds could not tell the difference between there own offspring and cuckoos. However, this belief has been proved wrong by research on the southern pied babbler of Africa.
southern pied babbler
This bird lives in a group of up to 14 individuals. It has been observed that the dominant male will push out unrelated subordinate males. Females did not show any favor. It is purely a male thing. The prime behavior of the birds is the practice of male birds helping to raise the young of other mating pairs. They obviously remember who is related to whom, particularly in regard to their own young.

The males thrown out of groups do not fair well in life generally. Their health suffers. They become skinny and remain that way. Seldom do they become dominant males. There could be a message for humans here: perhaps men who have children with women who already have children by other men treat their own offspring better and scorn their stepchildren.
 
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New Technology to Revolutionize Sexing of Poultry

New technology automates the sexing of chicks.
Fattening up male chicks is a waste of resources. Furthermore, having to manually check the sex of chicks that are sold to producers is a costly burden. There must be an easier way. In Europe a way of determining the sex of chicks while still in the egg will revolutionize the industry.
Euthanizing male chicks
Female chickens fatten up much quicker than males. Moreover, males do not lay eggs. It may be possible to on-sale the "rejected" eggs for production of egg powder. The new system is 95 per cent effective after the ninth day of gestation.

The way male chicks are disposed of at present is not pretty: they are crushed alive by an industrial crusher. At first, Wouter Bruins of the Netherlands had the aim of ending this mass euthanization. Now it is seen as a potential extremely profitable enterprise. Sexing can be done at the rate of 4,500 an hour.
Technology by Ty Buchanan 
 Australian Blog
 
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Wild Cockatoos Are Swearing at People

Australian wild cockatoos have been "infiltrated" by domesticated cockatoos who have escaped. Wild birds are copying words learned by escaped household pets. Cockatoos are not the only wild birds being affected in this way. Galahs and corellas shout out words that startle people. Escaped birds breed with their wild counterparts and chicks learn to talk from parents.

The parrot family is extremely good at mimicking sounds they hear. Songbirds and hummingbirds can also do this to a degree. The problem is cockatoos and parakeets are social animals. To wild birds a word is just a new sound to be learned and used socially. Human babbling to learn language is called subsong in birds, where chicks learn by trial and error.

Like humans, cockatoos continue to learn "words" all through their lives. "Natural" cockatoo sounds go together to form a language which has its own grammar. Human words are being integrated into this language.

A pet bird may only hear a word once and the word is remembered for life, particularly swear words that are spoken with some gusto.
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Wildlife