Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Fertility clinic pioneer



A common sight in North America but a rare visitor to our backyard feeder is this Brown-headed Cowbird. They invented surrogate parenthood, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds and leaving the foster parents to do the hatching, feeding and rearing. Sometimes it seems that the origins of just about every human medical procedure lie in the wild.

3 comments:

  1. Really? They really do this? It never ceases to amaze me, the great diversity of the animal kingdom and what they do :)

    Cheers
    Robyn

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  2. If you want to start a fight, just go up to a cowbird and ask, "Who's your daddy?"

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