“One could argue that the strategy of the drongo to steal food from others seems very dishonorable in human standards.
“Crime pays,” Flower said, noting that the stolen stuff accounted for about a quarter of the food eaten by the drongos. When stealing food from other animals, drongos are able to eat larger prey than they normally would be able to capture on their own like scorpions, beetle larvae and even geckos. These birds, common in southern Africa, usually get meals the honest way, such as capturing insects in mid-air using their superb aerial skills. “They’re also highly aggressive and are renowned for attacking eagles and hawks, for which they apparently have no fear,” added Flower, whose study appears in the journal Science. “They’re rather demonic little black birds with red eyes, a hooked beak and a forked tail,” said evolutionary biologist Tom Flower of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. The researchers tracked 64 forked-tailed drongos over a span of nearly 850 hours in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa close to the Botswana border to unravel this unique behavior. Scientists described on Thursday how this medium-sized bird brazenly deceives other animals by mimicking alarm calls made by numerous bird species - and even meerkats - to warn of an approaching predator in a ruse to frighten them off and steal food they leave behind.
Forked-tail drongo is shown perched in Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa in 2008 in this image courtesy of Tom Flower.
0 kommentar(er)
