Write Lightning is a blog from writer Deb Thompson.
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Wed, May 27 2009
Eating (and learning) like a bird
We've been getting a human's eye view of a family of blue jays lately. The parents built a nest in a fruit tree in the back yard and have been busy taking food to the hungry mouths. The babies are now as big as the parents, but are still begging for a meal whenever a parent comes near. Sometimes they still get their treats, but the parents are beginning to peck at the young ones now and then, probably in an effort to get them to fend for themselves more.
We've been throwing a few raw peanuts in the shell to the parent birds for some time and now the young ones have realized there is food in those shells. They pick one up now and then, but they haven't quite mastered the art of breaking the shell to get a nut. And their beaks don't seem to be quite mature enough at this point to do the pounding on the nut that the adults do in order to get small bits to swallow. (We can often hear an adult pounding a nut on the house gutters or on top edge of the fence boards.)
It's fascinating to me that so much of life, for mammals at least, is learned through a combination of instinct, observation and good old trial and error. But apes and humans seem to get frustrated and pitch a fit much more often when learning than birds do. Birds and cats and even cows seem to just keep going back and practicing until they get it right. There's definitely a practical economy of energy in their low-key approach to life.
posted at: 21:00 | category: /Miscellaneous | link to this entry
We've been getting a human's eye view of a family of blue jays lately. The parents built a nest in a fruit tree in the back yard and have been busy taking food to the hungry mouths. The babies are now as big as the parents, but are still begging for a meal whenever a parent comes near. Sometimes they still get their treats, but the parents are beginning to peck at the young ones now and then, probably in an effort to get them to fend for themselves more.
We've been throwing a few raw peanuts in the shell to the parent birds for some time and now the young ones have realized there is food in those shells. They pick one up now and then, but they haven't quite mastered the art of breaking the shell to get a nut. And their beaks don't seem to be quite mature enough at this point to do the pounding on the nut that the adults do in order to get small bits to swallow. (We can often hear an adult pounding a nut on the house gutters or on top edge of the fence boards.)
It's fascinating to me that so much of life, for mammals at least, is learned through a combination of instinct, observation and good old trial and error. But apes and humans seem to get frustrated and pitch a fit much more often when learning than birds do. Birds and cats and even cows seem to just keep going back and practicing until they get it right. There's definitely a practical economy of energy in their low-key approach to life.
posted at: 21:00 | category: /Miscellaneous | link to this entry
