13 DUCKS AND COUNTING

The mother duck recognizes her own offspring as individuals and as hers. This is why when two broods run into each other and get momentarily mixed up, they generally depart in their correct family groups, rather than mom simply leaving with any six ducklings. So, while mother duck may have some ability to observe greater than and less than, this isn't what she likely observes when missing one of her young. However her brain encodes it, she realizes that she's missing her small female with the dark markings.

Moreover, the young are alerting her that there's a problem. They make noises when they're distressed, such as being trapped in a storm drain.

How about the cuckoo that takes exactly one egg and replaces exactly one egg in a nest of many eggs; but the new egg is quite different to the other bird's eggs in look and size than what Mama bird should expect to see on return to her nest? Does she count them I have always wondered Response to brood parasites like cuckoos depends on the local prevalence of those parasites. Birds that aren't in danger of cuckolding like ravens will incubate pretty much anything in or near the nest, while those that are like American robins are alert to things that look wrong and even evolve eggs that are obviously their own.

It means that birds who spend time and resources caring for their own eggs have higher reproductive success than birds who can't tell the difference between their eggs and other eggs. It starts with one bird with a random mutation who lays eggs that are a slightly different color, and that gives her a reproductive advantage. The mutation gets passed on to her offspring, and thousands of years later the entire species has evolved colored eggs. It ain't like there's a robin sitting in a tree thinking "you know, I feel like pink is going to be in this year".

S he is saying that Robin eggs are distinctive they are blue. They evolved this coloration as a way to distinguish their own eggs. It would be more accurate to say that this coloration evolved when it gave robins with blue eggs a substantial enough advantage over other robins that those birds died out leaving only the descendants of the original blue-egged robins. If I remember correctly, the cuckoo is exploiting a behavior common in small elevated-nesting birds to feed the loudest mouth as fast as possible. These elevated nesters are on a quick mission to stuff the babies with biomass as fast as possible, get them fledged, and get them on their own way.

Unlike with ducklings and other ground-nesters who are out and about, elevated nesters didn't adapt behaviors to keep track of their young; confinement to the nest handles that. The cuckoo is likely to be the only chick.

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Cuckoo eggs hatch earlier than their 'siblings' and the cuckoo chick will push the other eggs out of the nest before they hatch. This prevents any need for competition. The new egg most likely is not different. Cuckoos mimic the eggs of the host nest, sometimes eggs can even mimic size to a certain extent! Female cuckoos will as adults lay eggs in the nests of the species of their adoptive parents. It's a cool example of evolution at work; studies showed that the eggs which resembled the host eggs best were more likely the be accepted.

Otherwise the host bird might reject the whole nest or destroy the egg.

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Have you ever looked at a couple of coins and said 'yep, that's four coins' without individually counting them? Many animals have been studied and found to be able to subsitize to some degree. Humans have trouble subsitizing beyond four or five objects, with each added object to a group taking a distinctly longer time to suss out. Studies looking for counting in animals have to be careful that their subjects aren't merely subsitizing their way through the experiment!

Counting is a different and sort of more involved, difficult process. A study looked into a story of Chinese fishermen who would give comurants every eighth fish they caught as payment. The study found the birds could count quite high, to around seven. I don't have any study on hand, but crows have some small ability to count too. I found that really interesting.

I never heard of a cormorant before. The birds are actually used to catch fish. Here's a BBC video on the cormorants: At the end of the video they talk about the counting to 7 briefly. I remember from other sources that the cormorants would stubbornly refuse to work anymore until it got it's reward.

I assume the Chinese fishermen gave a reward at 8 because that number is lucky in the culture. These birds are amazing. Where I live there are always some of them around when going out on a boat.

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And one very interesting fact is that they have specialised feathers that improve their underwater movement hunting but in return they have to air dry their wings. Do you think that the ability to subsitize relates to how many babies a species has at once if they are then tasked with raising the young like humans and birds do?

Humans being able to subsitize to four already is evidence against this as we predominantly only have one offspring at a time. At some point in the past, were we expected to keep track of 4 at a time? What about the social aspect of our species, were certain people, maybe grandparents expected to keep track of the young while the fit adults went out to forage?

I can't find the study at the moment, but a study on intelligence of birds looked specifically at the ability to count. The study was conducted by having a shelter where people could enter and leave within sight of the bird, but where the bird could not see the number of people within the shelter. People entered and left the shelter, and the bird was observed to see if it thought the shelter was empty or still had someone left in it I don't recall how exactly.

My recollection is that only a few birds were able to consistently keep count - crows among them - but that most birds were not able to keep count. That would suggest that most birds just guesstimate numbers, and that only a few species can actually keep count of specific numbers.

Sorry for the lack of a link to the study - "counting birds" brings up a lot of articles on bird-watching, and "counting crows" brings up some really bad flashbacks from the 90's. When you immediately spot the presence of 4 on the vertical and 4 on the horizontal, that's subitizing. If you could glance at a cloud of 16 randomly arranged, that would be subitizing. Coots aren't exactly ducks, but their ecology is essentially that of ducks, and they can count!

Essentially the story is that female coots lay their eggs in their own nest, but also the nests of their neighbors. Since they want to raise their own chicks and not bother having to care for anyone else's chicks, they have evolved the ability to count the number of eggs in their nest. If a coot knows that she's only laid five eggs and she comes home to a nest with six eggs, she'll carefully and critically examine each egg to figure out which one was laid by her neighbor, and then she'll bury the parasite's egg so deep in her nest that it won't hatch.

Actually, cowbirds murder the young of any birds that reject the cowbird eggs. They're like the bird mafia.

We couldn't use wild animals because we could never be sure of the real number of individuals present. The researchers made fake bird colonies out of the decoy ducks on a beach in Adelaide, Australia. Experienced wildlife spotters challenged those who counted birds from drone imagery to see which group could get closest to the actual number of fake birds. Conditions on the day were ideal. The ground spotters counted the fake birds using binoculars or telescopes. Meanwhile, a drone was flown over the beach, taking pictures of the birds from the sky at different heights.

Citizen scientists then tallied the number of birds they could see in the photos. The drone approach won. But the scientists weren't finished there. Counting birds in photos takes a long time — and citizen scientists can get tired. So the researchers made a computer algorithm to count the ducks automatically, which yielded results just as good as humans reviewing the imagery. That is important because if we had to wait for a big shift in those numbers to notice the decline, it might be too late to conserve a threatened species.

The research paper was co-authored by scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, the University of Tasmania and Monash University. One surprise after another until a decision had to be made putting a stop to the insanity. Read more Read less. Explore our editors' picks for the best kids' books of the month. See which new books our editors' chose as this month's favorites for kids of all ages.

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Please try again later. This book is informative, factual and very colorful. The book is a factual account of the life cycle of ducklings as seen by the author. I found the book informative, colorful and amazing. Hope she writes a sequel.