Hi!
Do you guys have favourite (especially seasonal) lesser-known cool animal behaviours?
For background: I’m building a site (heavily based on iNaturalist as well as Wikipedia data) that shows what animals in any given location are up to right now (this time of year and day, and under the current weather conditions). Just for fun, since I figured it’d be cool to have a closer connection to the smaller ongoings of nature in places I can’t travel to any time soon.
It’s pretty straightforward to add when different species mate and raise young, like this one for example (a bat in Honduras because I love bats):
(And I’m finding lots of cool stuff I had no idea about, like how many birds lay eggs in warm spots from like geothermal activity or compost heaps and just…leave them there without any care. Like Melanesian Megapodes for example.)
If you guys have ideas for more “out there” cool behaviours, I’m all ears!
I have one from central India, about Common Hawk Cuckoos! They’re called brainfever birds due to their loud calls with increasing pitch and they’ve gotten vocal lately due to their breeding seasons. They are brood parasites; they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, usually Jungle Babblers. It’s one of my favorite seasonal behaviours, since the babblers innocently feed the cuckoo chicks as one of their own, despite the size difference. Asian Koels, Pied Cuckoos also do the same, but I’ve only seen the hawk cuckoo :)
I suppose this fact is known, but not entirely, and I just blab it to anyone near me when I hear the distant calls. I also found a research paper on it, and you can have a look: https://archive.org/details/httpsdiscoveryjournals.orgspeciescurrent_issue2021v22n70a3.pdf_202309
Welcome to the forum!
Oooh yeah that’s a good one! They look so dorky, feeding those massive chicks. Although I do feel bad for the parent’s own chicks… We have European Cuckoos too that are also parasitic; so I was actually surprised to learn that there are quite a few cuckoo species that don’t do that and raise their own young. Now I gotta go look up their calls, I wonder if I’ve heard them without knowing!
