But then I noticed that this youngster was still being fed by it's host parent, a male Common Yellowthroat.
He was busy keeping Baby Huey fed.
This mouth-full had a couple of insects destined for the apparently insatiable youngster.
In goes one.
And out it comes again. Apparently the cowbird was so intent on getting the second insect in the yellowthroat's mouth that it forgot to swallow the first insect (click on the photo to get a bigger version and you can just see the insect emerging from the cowbird's mouth).
Click on this picture and you can see the first insect crawling out of the cowbird's mouth.
The yellowthroat later grabbed the insect back and fed it again along with the second one in it's mouth.
The yellowthroat came back once more with a damselfly before the young cowbird switched to another perch across a narrow channel in the wetland.
6 comments:
OMG -- That has GOT to be the best blog title EVER! LOL
Great photos, it's hard work raising a cowbird baby.
Thanks Rebecca - It came to me last night, but to be truthful I am not sure if I had heard it or read it somewhere before and it was stuck somewhere in the back of my mind.
Thanks too Max. It has to be hard work when you are putting that much more mass on a nestling than for a conspecific nestling.
Stunning photos!
I wish I could find information regarding how it is cowbirds learn they ARE cowbirds...when raised by something else.
About that title; I've never seen it; maybe it just sounds so much like the song, huh? Very clever!
Great observation and a super sequence of photos. It still freaks me out to see parents that are so easily duped, and makes you wonder when/how that egg-discrimination gene comes about in nest parasitized birds.
Ha! Great series of shots. We watched a baby cowbird being fed by a Yellow Warbler this evening...a few shots after the feeding, the Warbler seemed to be staring and in wonder at the size of its youngster...as if to say, "How did this happen?" ;-)
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