The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

by Jennifer Ackerman

When the baby bird finally breaks into the light of day, it pops out as the most advanced chick of any bird species, instantly able to fend for itself, to run, feed, and fly. “Brush turkey chicks are so super precocial they almost require their own terminology,” says Jones. They need to be. You would think after all this that the chicks’ father might be waiting with a mouthful of food. But no. He’s actually a threat. “If a chick is unlucky enough to meet Dad on the way out,” says Jones, “he has no idea what the chick is. It’s just some horrible thing in his mound. And—I’ve seen this many times—he just boots it off into the bush.” The chicks survive this paternal hurling. What they don’t survive—and this is the absolute cost of having no parental care, says Jones—are the cats and dogs and foxes and goannas and everything else around the place intent on eating them. “There’s no parent to tell them what a predator looks like, what’s an appropriate behavior if a cat comes up, how to hide, what to do.” Some 97 percent of brush turkey chicks don’t make it through the first week.