this is a corncrake chick, also commonly misidentified as a rail’s chick! crow babies are MUCH uglier…
putrid little man
baby boy
Above, a precocial (mobile at birth, cute fluffball) baby, like chickens and ducks have. They’re able to run around and pick up food and act like birds. You see this in ground-dwelling species like shorebirds, where they can run after the adult. Downside, they need to be incubated for comparatively long times in the egg.
Below, an altricial (nakey and helpless at birth, terrible ugly beast) baby, like most songbirds have. Baby crows start out nakey, floppy little sock-puppet things that can’t really move and have to have food stuffed down their throat by adults. They hatch from the egg much sooner, and can be more easily contained in a nest, but are useless on their own.
my fav thing in wildlife research is the concept of animals being “trap happy” meaning the same animal goes into a trap on purpose again and again after it’s caught the first time bc it was like “hey…..there was food in there and Zero (0) predators and then they just let me go in the morning…….”
on one hand it fucks up our data but on the other hand……..I Get It you Funky Little Rodents
if it were pouring rain on my walk home from work at night and I found a big metal box full of pizza and a bed where no one else could bother me and the only condition is that in the cold light of day I’d have to face a bunch of scientists weighing me and then letting me go on the sidewalk I’d probably end up in there a lot.
Shrikes kill mice by repeatedly biting the weak point at the base of their necks.
These guys are called butcherbirds because, in addition to THAT, they impale their dead prey (insects, lizards, small mice, etc) on thorns or barbed wire. This is partially to store it out of reach of thieves, partially so they can keep it on the thorn and pull it apart to more easily swallow it.
This is a really interesting question! When it comes to breeding mishaps, it depends on the individual institution’s policy to tell the public about it or not. Some zoos are pretty open about accidental hybrids, weak young, etc. while others are pretty private. If you’re curious, here’s a little list of what breeding “whoopsies” might look like…
Aww, these birds are nesting together even though they’re different species, isn’t that swee- WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE EGG IS FERTLE
why did we put a species that hides their eggs in an exhibit where their nests are already so hard to find????
Guess what can fit through that fence~
The primate figured out where the birth control pill was hidden in her food
The primate’s buddy groomed out her birth control implant
We ran out of birth control and it’s taking forever to come in
Turns out breeding season wasn’t over and we didn’t get the memo
We have 200+ of these animals in a single area, your guess is as good as mine – a novel written collaboratively by aquarists and keepers of free-range small mammals and birds
Let’s put a tiny net in the life support system and catch all the floating eggs in this tank. I wonder what – oh okay it hatched out already…
I did NOT think those two could hybridize
What do you mean there was a typo in the studbook
They were together for less than an hour!
I’m sorry did you just say this one is hermaphroditic?
Guess what just hatched. Nope, guess again.
Quarantine just called – looks like she was pregnant when she got here
We were told she could never have babies again
We were told he was too old to be fertile anymore
“So it’s not a male… and it’s pregnant.”
“So our ‘male’ animal laid eggs this morning…”
SERIOUSLY WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THESE TWO COULD HYBRIDIZE
Sometimes I wonder if animals ever conceive of monsters. What menaces my dog in her nightmares? Is it only real creatures that she’s familiar with, or does she ever dream about stranger beasts – bigger, meaner dogs with barks like fireworks? Things that come out of the bathtub drains? Humans that only look like her humans, but smell horribly, impossibly wrong?
my rabbits have never, as far as i know, and i got them young, met any actual predators, save for one kitten smaller than them, and nonthreatening dogs they liked, but they still have that instinctual fear for predators. lots of rabbit owners will say theirs do the same – if theres something new in their area and its dark, theyll start thumping and acting panicked, running at any movement or noise they perceive, because they think the new shadow is some looming, unknown predator. my one rabbit, when she was still a baby, would sometimes thump and dart from nothing at all, while the other was unfazed (or simply startled from the others panic). i wonder what she thought was there
I’m very curious about the extent of different animals’ imaginations. The human imagination is incredibly rich and overactive and probably oranges to crabapples in comparison to most non-human animals’, but I wouldn’t be surprised even rabbits’ brains supply them with some form of imagined danger beyond pure instinctual reactions.
Crows seem to be able to form mental images of tools they want to make. Certain other birds, when exposed first to a snake and then to snakelike things, will give the “snake” alarm call more easily than if they just see the snakelike thing, suggesting they have a mental image of what a snake is and are more alert for one if they’ve gotten the idea.
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