On Sunday afternoon a friend phoned KD to relay some potentially exciting new news to me. She and another friend had apparently been discussing the bird picture I shot last week and he (the friend. Keep up with me here, willya?) was fairly sure that my mysterious unidentified oversized tweetering tot was, in fact, a cowbird fledgling much like the one pictured.
Check this out ... According to this article, cowbird mommas are nature's equivalent to a Las Vegas relationship. In, out. Bada-bing, bada-bang. She slips into another bird's nest to drop an egg into the bevvy of adorable pre-birds that the current nest dweller already has her haunches poised to fluff over with her warm belly feathers. Does it have to be a cowbird nest? HELL NO! Does she need much time? NO WAY!
Those critters are smart ... S--M--R--T. Letting someone else raise the babies, fill the flock, breeding bonanzas right and left. Meanwhile, there's a sparrow who could really use a ten week sabbatical or at the very least a Calgon soak, tired to the bone of feeding that supersized and oddly unfamiliar looking child of hers.
I've been scanning through web images of cowbirds, unable so far to make a positive ID on the coloring and pattern of the baby bird from my photo. But while I continue my searching, it sure seems a likely explanation that her baby's momma was a different momma with lots of babies and who knows how many daddies.
(And we think we need soap operas and docu-dramas to provide us our melodramadic fill?)
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