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How Birds Feed their Young
Feeding the young. Birds eat enormous amounts of food and grow with remarkable rapidity. Observations made on young birds show that they may eat their own weight of food in a day and increase in weight fifty per cent. One observer watched a nest of cedar waxwings and weighed the young each day till they left the nest. He found that the weight of one nestling was doubled on the first day, more than trebled on the second, and nearly quadrupled on the third. By the twelfth day it had increased in weight thirteen fold, and was nearly three times as long as when first hatched. The parents usually begin to feed the young at about sunrise and continue till sunset, making a working day of about fifteen hours. Observations show that on the average many birds feed their young about every four minutes, or about two hundred times a day.
In order to convey some idea of the vast amount of food consumed by nestihigs, a table is given below showing the number of times the young are fed hourly, during the day, as learned from actual ob servation. The numbei’ of visits varies with the age of nestlings, as they are generally fed oftener when nearly fledged than when first hatched.
Kind of food. The kind of food fed the young is usually the same kind that the adults use, which for most birds is insects, but in the case of the seed-eating birds, like sparrows, the young are fed at first almost exclusively on insects. The most common kinds of food are caterpillars, spiders, and grasshoppers. Some birds feed fruit to their young, the kingfishers feed flsh,and hawks and owls feed mice and other rodents.
Large insects are frequently broken into smaller pieces by the parents before being fed to the young. Some birds, like the hummingbird and flicker, feed their young by regurgitation. The food is first partially digested in the crop or stomach of the parent bird and then fed to the young by the parent bird’s inserting its bill far into the mouth of the nestling. As a prevention against overfeeding, young birds have an instinctive response in the throat. The parents place the food in the throat, and if the gullet is already full, the throat does not respond, and the parent removes the food and puts it into the throat of another, till one is found which does respond.
Cleaning the nest. Another duty of the parents is to keep the nest clean. The excreta of the young are voided in membranous sacs, and these are either removed by the parent or swallowed.
Brooding. During hot days birds may frequently be seen brooding their young. They stand with spreading wings and tail shielding the young from the sun’s rays, often themselves panting with wide- opened bills. During hot days this may occupy a large portion of the bird’s time, the bird sometimes remaining for a period of forty minutes without leaving. En the same way the birds may protect their young from rain.
A house wren’s day. In order to give some idea of the activities of birds while rearing their young, the following account of a day’s observations of a pair of house wrens is given.
During the summer of 1913 the class in nature- study at the
The observations began at 4 A.M., a half-hour before sunrise, and extended till 8.QO P.M., a half-hour after sunset. The birds began to feed their young at 4.36, three minutes before sunrise, and continued till 7.58, thirteen minutes after sunset, thus making a working day of fifteen hours and twenty-two minutes. At the end of the day the records were summarized with the following results: The young birds were fed two hundred and thirty-eight times, two hundred and eighteen by the female, eighteen by the male, and on two visits the sex was not determined.
The longest time between any two consecutive feedings was twelve minutes, except during the shower, when a period of sixteen minutes elapsed. The shortest thne between two consecutive feedings by the same parent was one half-minute. The male was singing most of the day. Frequently he sang with an insect in his closed bill, sometimes waiting several minutes before feeding the young. Three times (luring the day he drove away a red squirrel, and once another wren.
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