Streak the Skunk practices the art of puppy camouflage. Courtesy photo
By Carolyn A. (Cary) Neeper, Ph. D.Over the many years with birds and dogs and rabbits and a skunk in Los Alamos, I came to respect their intelligence, which I now believe has been vastly underrated, especially when it comes to food and sex. That’s why I found great delight when PBS ran a special called “Natural Born Hustlers.”
The Bower Bird with his fancy tunnel, decorated with carefully selected goodies in hope of attracting a female, is one example. I hadn’t realized that some of those goodies are laid out so that the female is chummed in closer and closer to the larger and larger items on display.
Other males have been known to snort warnings so a female will stop, look around, and decide he would be a protective mate. This happens only in mating season. The Marsh Harrier takes on feathers that look female while building a nest in a dominant male’s territory.
A delightful subterfuge was reported in another special that featured squid. While a dominant male courts a chosen female, another male will change his colors to those sported by females. The camouflaged male then inches under the courting dominant male and has his way with the real female.
The jays here in California quickly trained us to provide extra peanuts. Our bird feeder hangs just outside Don’s office window, a perfect spot to eye him and squawk. He’s very obedient. One jay quickly learned that arms out and a loud “No more,” meant just that. This spring he (she?) showed their shy chick where we routinely put out a few peanuts every morning. Now he (she?) comes to the bird feeder and gives Don the eye. No squawking, but it works very well.
We’re waiting for the spring chorus to start up over at Sausal Pond. The bullfrog females answer the males’ garumph in a minor third. Or maybe it’s a major third. Our daughter, after taking composition lessons at the SF Conservatory, says it could be a neutral third. Bullfrogs quickly learn to recognize the calls of smaller, delicious frogs.
Frogs have an amazing array of tricks to secure a mate and hatch their young. I heartily recommend John and Deborah Behler’s book, “Frogs: A Chorus of Colors.” When our continents were squeezed together several million years ago (Pangaea), amphibians were among the most dominant of all creatures on Earth.
Frogs were the first vertebrates to develop a tongue, eyelids, true ears, and a sounding board larynx. Their skin helps them breathe and take in water, while its huge variety of poisonous skin color patterns acts as warning to predators, and as heat exchanger, camouflage, oxygen absorber and mate attractor. No other species has had such a wide variety of ways to mate and raise families. Male or female tend the tadpoles or house them internally or on backs or leafs or not at all, once even in the female’s stomach.
The Behler’s collection of frog portraits is amazing, as is their vast knowledge of so many species and their brief tutorial on taking photos. Sadly, their decline is a real concern, but surely this book will help.