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Squirreling jays; Scarce as ostrich teeth
Q: You mention nutcrackers and jays, both of which are
better hoarders than magpies (at least, for longer times). Why, then, do bright
and shining things not also attract them? (James, LiPge,
Belgium)
 A:
We don’t know why but we do have a theory.
Blue jays mostly gather seeds. Courtesy of Dave Menke, US
Fish & Wildlife Service and Wikipedia
Jays and nutcrackers are mostly food gatherers, and take few
risks. Magpies eat more meat and, being predators, may be more curious and
adventuresome.
"This may attract them to salient items," says biopyschologist
Onur Güntürkün
of the Ruhr-Universität at Bochum, Germany.
"You can easily store nuts." But magpies do more. "If you are
inclined to kill for food or collect ticks from large bad-tempered animals [like
buffalo], then you do well to be interested in many different things. They all
can mean danger but sometimes also food."
Further Reading:
WonderQuest:
Why
magpies like shiny things
Wikipedia:
Blue jay
Wikipedia:
Nutcracker
Q: Do Ostrich have teeth to
eat? (Annette, Toronto, Canada)
 A:
It’s a warm sunny winter day in Knysna on the southern tip of South Africa. A
grayish-brown ostrich walks deliberately, with great ponderous steps, towards a
small plant. Her head hangs low as she scans the ground for food. Near the
plant, a lizard darts out; the beak strikes. Does she crunch the morsel?
Ostrich — any teeth? Click
here
for another look. Courtesy of Wikipedia
No. She has no teeth. She shifts the tasty bit to her
crop (a holding
pocket in her esophagus), picks up her head to about ankle height, and moves on,
her soft-feathered white-tipped wings swaying with her movement — hunting. The
head pecks again, this time getting small bits of gravel. Now amongst brown
grass, she finds seeds. Her head moves here and there pecking up the bounty like
a strange long-legged, long-necked, precisely-pecking chicken.
She raises her head to its full 8-foot (2.4 m) height, peers
around for trouble, and swallows. The ball of seeds, half-devoured lizard, and
gravel emerges from the crop and slides slowly down her neck — stretching the
neck skin as it goes — finally into her tough muscular stomach, called a
gizzard. The bits of gravel and sand that she swallowed earlier act as teeth in
the gizzard and grind the hard food into manageable bits for her intestines to
digest. Her gizzard content may be 45% sand and stones. All birds have gizzards
and "chew" their food this way.
Her 45-foot (14-m) long intestine (twice the length of a
human’s) is long enough to absorb practically every scrap of nutrients in the
food. She wastes little.
Further Reading:
Wikipedia:
Ostrich
Christopher Perrins, ed., Firefly encyclopedia of Birds.
Oxfordshire, UK: Andromeda Oxford Limited, 2003.
San Diego Zoo:
Ostrich
EJ Peiker, Nature Photographer:
Ostrich images
ZooBook:
Quick facts
Enchanted Learning:
More facts
University of Michigan, Animal Diversity:
Ostrich images
Google search for
ostrich images:
(Answered Dec. 20, 2005)
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