the carefree cowbird

[asakiyume]

amaebi has been posting extremely entertaining excerpts from Garden Birds of Britain and North-West Europe, by Dominic Couzens and Carl Bovis--fun in the way the descriptions of the various birds makes you think about people (but at the same time is very illuminating about the birds).

It got me thinking about the brown-headed cowbird. I spent a pleasant afternoon with a female brown-headed cowbird a few years back. She was hunting around in the grass for seeds and insects, and I was mowing the grass, but I stopped, because she was paying so very little attention to my advances. So I sat down very close and watched her, and she was fine with that. She had a pretty face (here's someone else's photo).

Cowbirds are nest parasites. The female lays her eggs in someone else's nest, and then the unsuspecting parents bring up this baby as well as their own--or sometimes instead of their own, as the cowbird baby will often crowd its siblings out.

So, the parental cowbirds never experience babies and child rearing. They accomplish the evolutionarily required duty and then live out the rest of their days footloose and fancy free. (I wanted to find out if they were monogamous or not, and that looks like it's quite contested! Interesting.) I guess the same thing is true of most fish and amphibians and reptiles--and I'm used to it in those creatures--but I guess it feels different for me when it's birds. We have so many examples of birds that work so hard with child rearing.

I wonder if a cowbird feels any kinship with or loyalty toward the bird species that raised it. Apparently it leaves its eggs with more than 240 host species.¹ So if it's raised by a hooded warbler, does it feel kinship when it sees a hooded warbler? Is there a difference in cowbird behavior depending on what nests they were raised in? Or are most of their habits hardwired?

Some of the articles about them use really inflammatory language and make the birds into villains. Kind of like when people get mad at other birds for using nesting boxes that they want bluebirds to take advantage of.

I could comment on the dangers of anthropomorphism, but I mean, **I'm** anthropomorphizing here, myself, so that would be kind of hypocritical. And I think some amount of anthropomorphism is inevitable, and I feel like it's where empathy starts (and/but also judgmental thoughts). And history is full of instances where the scientific community tells us not to anthropomorphize about, say, animal grief, and then some decades later has to eat their words.

¹ Ronald L. Mumme and Claire Lignac, "Living with Cowbird Nest Parasitism--and Thriving," American Ornithological Society, November 30, 2022.