Birds actually like to stick their heads in things and chirp/sing because of the way the sound waves bounce off the inside. It’s like the birb version of when you yell HELLOOOOO into a canyon to hear the echo 🙂
| Shaba, the proxy matriarch, teaches all the babies to browse in the
wild. After her mother was killed by poachers, Shaba was brought to
Reteti Elephant Sanctuary (@r.e.s.c.u.e)
in 2016. Initially wary of the keepers, Shaba is now an instrumental
part of the sanctuary, helping to keep order, teaching the young ones
how to navigate steep paths and greeting new orphans with a heartfelt
and emotional hello. Shaba guides her fellow elephants as they adapt to
life at the sanctuary in addition to helping teach the keepers how to
better care for their charges.Reteti Elephant Sanctuary (@r.e.s.c.u.e)
is the first ever community-owned and run elephant sanctuary in
Africa. Reteti operates in partnership with Conservation International (@conservationorg who provide critical operational support and work to scale the community-centered model to create lasting impacts worldwide.
Learn more about how you can get involved and help support this vital initiative by following
Photo by 👉 @khs_althani Mother’s Love ❤ The
Kentish Plover is 15-17 cm long and a small cosmopolitan shorebird of
the family Charadriidae that breeds on the shores of saline lakes,
lagoons and coasts, populating sand dunes, marshes, semi-arid desert and
tundra..
Disclaimer: I was hesitant to post this, but I really want people to see what these birds are capable of. So, I’ll just start off by explaining that I am an undergraduate researcher in an Animal Behaviour and Welfare lab at a fairly reputable agricultural/veterinary university. The work that I and my colleagues do seeks to improve the lives of poultry in commercial farms across the world, first and foremost. I am a vegetarian, and while I don’t support any animal meat industry financially, I recognize that it does help feed millions of people worldwide who do not know better or have the choice to go vegan/vegetarian, and until that is able to completely change, there is a need for solid science that supports animal welfare and argues for better quality of life for them in the meantime. That said, the turkey poults in this video are research animals who belong to my university’s poultry research station, and are kept in conditions designed to mimic a commercial farm setting. They still have a much better quality of life than that of a “real” commercial turkey (i.e. more space, and positive human interaction from me), but I would still personally be happiest seeing these girls roaming free in the grass and sun like my chickens and ducks at home. Sadly, though, I’m no longer in a position to adopt any more of my lab’s birds…
Last week, I posted about the “ABCs” of animal behaviour and training, along with a video of one of my hens doing some short flights to my arm. Training them to step up or fly onto a perch/arm is one of the first things I do with any bird, be it a chicken, raptor, or parrot. The next behaviour most bird owners will train is targeting. Targeting is when an animal learns to touch a specific body part to a certain location/object. The most common example of targeting is actually teaching a dog to sit – the dog is targeting its rear end to the floor. With birds, people typically train them to touch their beak to a “target” stick. I’ve done this in the past with the falcons I work with, and the hens at home picked it up quickly as well. But, I wanted to see if the turkey poults at the lab could learn it as well. I’d been hearing a lot of people making comments about how “dumb” turkeys are, and naturally, I wanted to give the birds more respect and prove the skeptics wrong. In addition, the actual research project I’m doing with these turkeys is quite demanding of them, to say the least, so I figured I owed it to them to give them something enriching and fun to do during our breaks.
As always, I started by training the babies to respond to a bridge – the clicking sound I make with my mouth. You’ve probably seen people buy/use handheld clickers for training cats and dogs, but this is another one of those things that really isn’t necessary. Most bird trainers will not use these, as it takes away the use of one of your hands, and if you have a bird perched on one hand you really need the other one to be free. Your bridge doesn’t have to come from a fancy clicker, nor does it have to be a click at all. It just has to be any stimulus that is clearly perceived by the animal, that you can produce quickly and consistently – a whistle, verbal praise, etc. will do just fine. The turkeys were slow to pick this up over the first week within hatching or so (but let’s face it, all babies are dumb), but they were able to associate it (and my presence) with yummy canned corn eventually.
Next, I had to shape the targeting behaviour using successive approximations. This is animal trainer gobbledygook for: start simple, then work your way up. The poults were naturally curious enough to peck at the target stick when I first introduced it, so I would reinforce any attempt to peck any part of the stick at first. Then, I would only reinforce pecks that were aimed at the duct tape. Once that was down, the turkeys were eager to follow the stick/me around their cage, and peck it for some corn. The stick was not scented/baited in any way – they really did learn to target to it for a reward. Many zoos will do this with their animals as an enriching activity, or to make both the zookeepers and animals’ lives a bit easier – for example, instead of having to stressfully chase and then shove an animal into a crate/holding area when their enclosure needs to be cleaned, keepers can simply target the animal into the crate, and clean away while it enjoys a reward. I’ll repeat from my last post: giving animals in captivity some control over their environment by giving them a choice to actively engage in activities like this is so important for their emotional and psychological health.
Here are some videos of professional target training done in various zoos with rhinos, hornbills, and monitor lizards! You can look up tons of other examples like these online yourself:
today's bird 