{"id":152854,"date":"2024-02-10T05:25:34","date_gmt":"2024-02-10T12:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=152854"},"modified":"2024-02-10T07:11:07","modified_gmt":"2024-02-10T14:11:07","slug":"cowbird-drinking-bison-snot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2024\/02\/10\/cowbird-drinking-bison-snot\/","title":{"rendered":"Cowbird Drinking Bison Snot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Birds do what they have to do in order to survive in harsh conditions.<\/p>\n

I published several of these photos long ago but I’ve long been unhappy with that post because of the way I’d processed the images and because I could\/should have included more photos to better document and explain this fascinating behavior. <\/em><\/p>\n

So yesterday I spent far more time than I wanted to attempting to retrieve those photos from an old, clunky computer on its last legs. Eventually I succeeded so today’s post includes five or six photos that are new to my blog. Image quality is mediocre because the photos were taken in harsh light so I had to heavily process them in order to manage the extreme contrast as best I could.<\/em><\/p>\n

For any who may be disturbed by the crassness of my title, feel free to substitute “mucus” for the offending word.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Before Europeans came to North America and modified the environment into the agricultural and suburban landscapes of today, the range of the Brown-headed Cowbird was limited to the short-grass plains where they followed the almost endless herds of American Bison as they fed on the insects stirred up by those wandering behemoths. Early settlers so strongly associated cowbirds with bison that they almost exclusively called them \u201cbuffalo birds\u201d.<\/p>\n

Today that relationship continues to exist wherever bison can still be found and\u00a0Antelope Island is one of those places.<\/p>\n

One of the many challenges facing cowbirds was obtaining sufficient moisture as they followed the bison herds over the hot, rolling plains. On a hot morning in late summer of 2008 I documented a cowbird behavior that illustrated one of their strategies for dealing with that problem.<\/p>\n

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I found this huge bison bull languishing in the broiling sun next to a boulder that he’d been using as a scratching post. Here he’s scratching his right hip on the boulder at lower left. I knew I was too close to the bison to get all of him comfortably in frame but I took a few photos anyway.<\/p>\n

There were some Brown-headed Cowbirds nearby but at first I wasn\u2019t paying much attention to them.<\/p>\n

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Then this female cowbird flew in and attempted to hover near the bison’s nose.<\/p>\n

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Hovering isn’t a highly developed skill in cowbirds so it was difficult for her, but she persisted. While I was in the field I had no idea what she was doing because it was all happening too fast and I was concentrating more on attempting to get my shots as sharp as possible than I was on trying to figure out what was going on.<\/p>\n

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She’d hover near his nose for a few moments and then rest on the ground below his massive head. Hovering is hard work. This behavioral pattern was…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

repeated…<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

time and time again.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t until I got home and looked at my photos on the big screen that I confirmed what she was doing.<\/p>\n

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She was drinking watery, mucus-laden secretions that were clinging to and dripping from the bison’s nose. Here she’s slurping up a gobby string of it as she’s hovering.<\/p>\n

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A closer crop of the previous photo reveals a little more detail.<\/p>\n

This is a behavior that I’d never seen before and I haven’t seen, or at least noticed, since. But I suspect it happens far more often than I’m aware of. To human sensibilities it may seem like a gross behavior but when times are tough, birds do what they have to do to survive. As far as I’m concerned, more power to them.<\/p>\n

Apologies if you were eating breakfast while reading this post.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Birds do what they have to do in order to survive in harsh conditions. (8 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,5,334,347,1291,8,395],"tags":[31,7335,780,7336,7334,7333,1347,1292,311],"class_list":["post-152854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-bison-mammals","category-brown-headed-cowbird-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-miscellaneous","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-bison-bull","tag-brown-headed-cowbird","tag-buffalo-birds","tag-drinking-bison-mucus","tag-drinking-bison-snot","tag-hovering","tag-molothrus-ater","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/brown-headed-cowbird-5676-big-crop-horizontal-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-DLo","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152854"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152854\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":152941,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152854\/revisions\/152941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}