Is it true that the first person/animal/thing a baby bird sees, it will think that that’s it’s mother? Or is that just a myth or only applies to some species or types?
Thanks for any info on this.
It seems to be true for at least some species but I can guarantee that every extant species of bird has NOT been tested, so it may not be true for all. The big name in this area was/is Konrad Lorenz, and the term imprinting is usually applied to the phenomenon.
You may have heard of a real life application of this phenomenon…conservationists are using it to attempt to save some rare species such as whooping cranes.
It’s called “imprinting,” and I’m not sure it’s as much about the first thing it sees as what it’s around most of the time. That’s what makes it know it’s a bird and not a rock. People do pretty much the same thing - a human raised by dogs would probably not realize it was not, in fact, a dog.
A cromulent link:
http://www.ovc.uoguelph.ca/vth/wildbird/WBC/imprinti.html
One of our resident bird experts will probably explain far better than I soon.
Lorenz did his work with geese, but I don’t know if all birds have the same imprinting process. It would be reasonable to assume that other birds who lay eggs on the ground also have a similar adaptation.
Birds don’t; just imp[rint on the first thing they see. They do however tend to imprint in the first large moving object they see. Thus they will normally imprint on the mother but in captivity will imprint happily on humans, dogs, goats and even balloons. Racinchikki made a joke about birds imprinting on rocks, but of the first large moving object they saw as a rock then they would happily imprint in that.
There are at least two groups of birds that do no imprint in the usual way- the megapodes and the cuckoos- and that’s because they never see their parents. The megapodes don’t imprint on anything but will form group attachments to members of their own species based on behavioural and visual cues. The cuckoos seem to imprint on the adoptive parent temporarily but this wears off very fast.
Some do, some don’t. Parrots don’t, and the myth that your parrot won’t love you unless you hand feed him yourself from infancy has killed a lot of baby birds at the hands of unskilled hand feeders. Even the species that do, don’t all imprint in the same way. Mallards imprint on the first moving object they see. For Greylag Geese, it has to be moving, a certain height off the ground, and making the proper goose noise. (I hope I’m remembering this right; I have no idea where I put my copy of King Solomon’s Ring.) Konrad Lorenz discovered this by getting some newly hatched geese to imprint on him, and then discovered that he had to crawl everywhere on his hand and knees while honking, otherwise the baby birds started crying for Mommy. One day he was crawling around in his front yard, making goose noises, when he realized a whole bunch of his neighbors were in front of his house, staring at him. The baby geese were hidden in the tall grass, and the neighbors had no idea what the nutty professor was up to this time.