{"id":53195,"date":"2017-11-03T05:06:19","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T11:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=53195"},"modified":"2017-11-03T05:09:53","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T11:09:53","slug":"a-snot-and-spit-drinking-cowbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/03\/a-snot-and-spit-drinking-cowbird\/","title":{"rendered":"A Snot And Spit-drinking Cowbird"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occasionally I rerun\u00a0a favorite\u00a0older blog post because few current readers have ever seen it. This one was published back on February 27, 2013. I’ve rewritten some of the text and tweaked the formatting. Image quality is mediocre because the photos were taken in very harsh light so I had to heavily process them in order to manage the extreme contrast as best I could and that produced some processing artifacts<\/em><\/p>\n

For any who may be\u00a0disturbed by the crassness of my title you have my permission to substitute mucus and saliva for the offending two words… \ud83d\ude42\u00a0For me they work just fine in this context.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Before Europeans came to North America and\u00a0cleared forests which modified the environment into the agricultural and suburban landscapes of today\u00a0the range of the Brown-headed Cowbird was limited to the short-grass plains where they followed the almost\u00a0endless herds of\u00a0American Bison and fed on the insects stirred up by\u00a0those wandering behemoths. Early settlers so strongly associated cowbirds with bison that they almost exclusively\u00a0called 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 enough moisture as they followed the bison herds\u00a0over the hot, rolling plains.\u00a0Several years ago in late summer\u00a0I photographed a cowbird behavior that illustrated one of their methods of dealing with\u00a0that problem.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I found this huge bull languishing in the broiling sun next to a boulder that he had been using as a scratching post.\u00a0A group of Brown-headed Cowbirds\u00a0was in the vicinity but at first I wasn\u2019t paying much attention to them.\u00a0Then this female (at frame bottom)\u00a0flew in very\u00a0close\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

and began flying at the nostrils of the bull. Initially I was unsure about what she was doing but she did it repeatedly and eventually it became clear that she was\u2026<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

drinking the mucus-laden secretions from the bison\u2019s nostrils and\/or mouth. She would actually hover in place as she gobbled down the long, stringy strands of mucus.<\/p>\n

Not a pretty sight and perhaps a bit unsettling to delicate sensibilities but what an incredibly adaptive behavior for survival in hot, arid conditions.<\/p>\n

I love seeing and documenting\u00a0stuff like this!<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

For any who may be disturbed by the crassness of my title you have my permission to substitute mucus and saliva for the offending two words…<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12807,"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":[3,5,334,1291,8,395],"tags":[31,56,780,3641,1292,3640,311],"class_list":["post-53195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-brown-headed-cowbird-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-miscellaneous","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-bison","tag-brown-headed-cowbird","tag-drinking-saliva","tag-molothrus-ater","tag-swallowing-mucus","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/bison-and-cowbird-5681-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-dPZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53195","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=53195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}