Matt Reetz enjoying a water feature in Texas (Photo by Matt Reetz)
In this 2 part episode, we answer questions like "how does a bird breathe in the egg?" and learn about "brood parasites" and their fascinating approach to parenthood with our Baby Bird expert Dr. Matt Reetz, the Executive Director at Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance!
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Transcription
Part One
Hey, and welcome to Questions Asked by Curious Kids or QuACK, a podcast made by Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance. This is a podcast where we gather questions about nature from kids to be answered with a local expert. My name is Mickenzee. I'm an educator, and I'll be the host for this series. This episode I'll be interviewing Dr. Matt Reetz, the executive director here at Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, and he's going to be answering questions about baby birds. This episode is really special because there are two parts, and the first part will get to know Matt and talk about things like hatching and caring for baby birds. And in part two we will answer some questions about parent birds too. Alrighty, let's jump in with Matt.
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Mickenzee: Hey, Matt. Welcome on. Before we get started with the kids' questions, can you tell us a little bit about what you do at Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance?
Matt: Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I am the Executive Director of the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, which means that I'm sort of the head of the organization. It's a nonprofit organization that works on bird conservation through a bunch of different ways, like land protection and habitats and education and some citizen science stuff. And, it's a really great job.
Mickenzee: Cool. Okay. In this episode, we're talking all about baby birds. Could you tell us how you came to know so much about birds and specifically baby birds?
Matt: Well, I mean, first of all, birds are awesome. And I've known that birds are awesome for a long time. My mom was a big bird watcher, and I actually didn't know I was all that excited about them until I went to college, and I took some cool classes that got me really, really interested in birds. And, ever since then, I've just been kind of hooked.
Mickenzee: I love that. Okay, so all of our questions today were submitted by the third graders at Lincoln Elementary School here in Madison. Student wants to know how do baby birds breathe when they're inside the egg?
Matt: Good question. So obviously they're inside an egg and they don't breathe the same way that they would outside of the egg. But it's, an eggshell is really an amazing thing. It, birds that are in the egg still need to get oxygen and also get rid of the things that they breathe out, like carbon dioxide. And with human babies that are in, their momma, they get oxygen through something called the placenta. And the blood, the blood that the mom shares with the baby when it's in the belly. Obviously an egg is separate from the mom, but there are little tiny holes in an egg where oxygen air can seep into the egg and kind of like, like an umbilical cord. A baby bird puts out these little blood vessels from its body that go right up to the edge of the egg, and oxygen that comes into the egg can go into those blood vessels and feed the little baby, and also get rid of the things that it's breathing out. So it's able to breathe inside through diffusion of air into those blood vessels, but also as the baby gets bigger in the egg, a little air pocket forms as the nestling is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And at some point it's big enough that it can start moving around and it pokes a hole. It opens up the air pocket, and that is the first time that the baby bird is able actually to use its own lungs. It's the first breath it ever takes with its lungs. And then the next day it pokes out of the egg and takes its first breath of outside air. So it gets oxygen and air and breathes in a couple different ways as it's growing up.
Mickenzee: I guess that leads into our next question of how does a baby bird know when to hatch?
Saltmarsh Sparrow hatching! (photo by USFWS)
Matt: Ooh, that's a good question, too. And, really, it has something to do with how long they are in the egg. If you ever cracked an egg open, there's a yolk inside and there's stuff in there, but a little embryo forms and it feeds off the stuff that's in the egg. Also is breathing through what we were just talking about. But it starts to grow and develop. And as it gets bigger, more and more of the things that are in the egg that provide food are used up and more of the moisture starts to seep out of the egg, it gets starts to dry out, the chick gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then at some point it's really fills up the whole egg. And at that point it's really big enough. It doesn't really know it's time to go, but it starts moving around. You can actually sometimes you can sometimes hear a bird inside of the egg moving around, and then it will poke its, use its beak to poke a hole and hatch out.
Mickenzee: Wow, that's so interesting. Okay, so once the baby bird is out of its egg, we all have seen pictures or might be able to conjure up an image of like a baby chick, and they don't quite have the same feathers as a grown up bird. So this student wants to know, how do baby birds keep warm when they don't have as many feathers?
Wood Thrush on nestlings, nestling on left is a Brown-headed Cowbird (Photo by Kelly Colgan Azar)
Matt: Well, some baby birds when they are born, they do have full feathers, but most birds, when they come out don't have any feathers at all. They have to grow those and they are kept warm by two things. One is a safe place, a nest that is in a safe place. But the other is through their mom or through their or their dad, depending on how they do the care. Let's just say it's the mom bird, and she'll have something called a brood patch. And that is a little spot on her belly that doesn't have any feathers, but it's right up against the skin and she can sit on the nestlings. This is how she keeps the eggs warm. When they're incubating, when they're growing, she'll use that brood patch, and that brood patch is nice and warm. It transfers the heat from her blood through the skin and onto the eggs and onto the nestlings, so they stay nice and warm under mom and her little brood patch. So they also get fed lots and lots of really good food. So they get lots of insect food, or really nutrient or protein rich food that keeps them warm and growing.
Mickenzee: Awesome. So parent birds are pretty important to taking care of baby birds, and we're often told not to bother nests. Do birds abandon their babies if they smell human scent on them? Or is there something else going on there?
Matt: That's another good question, but the good news is that birds do not abandon their young when someone has touched them. That doesn't mean that you should touch them. You should leave them alone. We don't want to disturb nests, but birds don't really have a great sense of smell. Some birds, like turkey vultures, might have a really good sense of smell, but that's hard to know. But they don't really use their sense of smell that much. But even if they could, they've invested. They put a lot into their kids. They built a nest. They laid eggs, they took time to sit on top of them, and then they hatched out. They're feeding them. And so they really wouldn't want to just abandon them just because they smelled like something else. I mean, if I was a kid and I smelled like a squirrel or something, my mom wouldn't abandon me. She's actually invested a lot in me. So she wouldn't want to just leave me alone.
Mickenzee: Yeah, totally. And I imagine too, other animals that do use their sense of smell, might smell of human near the nest and use that as a way to find the nest. Like a predator, like a raccoon or something else.
Matt: That's a great point. And that's another reason why we leave nests alone, that we don't mess with them. We want to make sure that they're they have the best chance of surviving, growing up and fledging from the nest. So we don't want to bring our own scent to the nest so that a predator can use it as something to follow. If you want to watch a nest grow. And, but for babies to come out of the nest, that's a great thing to watch from a distance.
Mickenzee: Yes. Great advice.
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If you are interested in learning more about baby birds or getting involved with our programs, please head to our website at swibirds.org From there you can find our free lessons, games and activities as well as check out our event calendar or citizen science programs. And be sure to come back and listen to part two, where Matt tells us more about how parent birds know how to take care of their babies.
If you have a big nature question that you'd like to have answered on the show, please have a grown up or a teacher submit your question to info@swibirds.org with the title Questions for QuACK. Make sure to include your grade and the school you attend so I can give you a shout out. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you join us next time on QuACK!
Part 2
Hey, and welcome to Questions Asked by Curious Kids or QuACK, a podcast made by Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance. This is a podcast where we gather questions about nature from kids to be answered with a local expert. My name is Mickenzee. I'm an educator, and I'll be the host for this series. This is part two to our baby birds episode with Dr. Matt Reetz, where we'll answer some questions about parent birds, as well as more information about baby birds.
If you haven't listened to part one, I recommend starting there. Okay, let's jump back in.
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Mickenzee: This student wants to know why are baby ducks yellow, and why are some baby birds different colors or look different from their parents?
Camoflauged ducklings (photo by Andy Reago and Chrissy McClarren)
Matt: Well, most of the ducks that we see that are yellow are domestic ducks. They're the ones that are on farms. And, and sometimes you see them on lakes and things like that and in cities, but those yellow ones are unusual. Those are ones we don't really see the yellow in the wild. For the wild species of ducks like wood ducks and mallards and, and all sorts of different kinds of ducks, the chicks are usually some yellow, but also some brown and some black, and they're striped or spotted. And what's called the plumage is what the feathers look like helps them to blend into the environment. So you wouldn't really see a yellow duck so much in the wild. You'd see one that actually blends in really well with the surroundings, so it can be hidden from potential predators and things like that. So that's one of the reasons why they look a little bit different.
And they'll get their other feathers later on.
Mickenzee: Awesome. Okay. And our last question is this student learned that mostly female birds take care of their babies. And why is that the case for most birds?
Matt: So what's really interesting about this is that yes, females are very good at taking care of their babies. But in most species of birds, about 75%, three out of four, of the bird species in the world, both parents help with raising the young. And they do that in lots of different ways. They might help build the nest. They might help with incubating. They might help with guarding and protecting. They might help with, feeding and feeding up both in the nest and outside the nest. And so it's more likely that you'll get males and females helping to raise the young. So, I think it's only about 8% or something like that is a small number of birds that are just females take care. Like hummingbirds, which is interesting. A lot of the hummingbirds do female or the females take care of all of it, but in most cases it's both males and females. So it's really, really interesting. But there are also other strategies too that birds use. Some of them the males take care of the young, in some cases there are there's something called cooperative breeding, which is where an ostrich is a really great example of this. An ostrich is a really, really awesome bird. It's huge, doesn't fly. It's so unique looking. But they also have a really interesting way of reproducing. So they'll be one male and one female that are the main ostriches in a group of like maybe 7 or 10 ostriches. And there's one nest and there are 50 eggs in the nest by a whole bunch of different ostriches, females that lay in this one, one nest, and the dominant female, the main female, will incubate it. It's a nest that's built by the male who's the dominant male, and the other females lay in there. She puts her eggs in the best spot so that she can make sure that they're the best incubated ones, but then everybody else helps raise the young. So it's a really, really different way of raising baby birds together.
Mickenzee: Yeah. That's cool. Community. Are there any other birds that do a unique thing for raising their young? Like maybe some that don't raise their young at all?
Brown-headed Cowbird eggs (smaller, tan and speckled) in Red-winged Blackbird nest (Photo by USFWS)
Eastern Wood-Pewee feeding young Brown-headed Cowbird (Photo by Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren)
Matt: So one of my favorite birds does a really unique thing. It's called a Brown-headed Cowbird. And it is a called a brood parasite. That sounds really nasty. But what it does, it's like a lot of other birds that have developed this kind of new way of, of having kids and cuckoos actually do this. You know, that bird that goes cuckoo, cuckoo, the Common Cuckoo is a brood parasite also. And what they do is they lay their eggs in other birds nests, which is really, really different. Right. And so they find a nest that they think is the right kind of bird to raise their young. The female will lay her eggs in that nest. It might be one egg, it might be two eggs and might be more. And that what's called the host species. Like, let's say it's, cardinal, a Northern Cardinal, one of those red birds that we see a lot. Cowbird lays egg in the cardinal nest, and that cardinal raises the cowbird also. So it's a really unique way of having kids, I guess.
Mickenzee: Totally, Yeah.
Matt: Right. And actually the female and the males are all they're kind of paying attention to to see what happens with the nest. And you might ask, well, how come the bird doesn't recognize the, that new bird? Sometimes they don't know. Sometimes they look the same. Sometimes they just haven't really gotten a lot of, of time to learn that that might not be theirs.
And sometimes these, these kinds of species they’ll basically say, well, you better raise this or I'm going to do something.
Mickenzee: Oh, no.
Matt: Like take your egg out. They can make make it hard to say no.
Mickenzee: I see yeah. It's a very cool bird. We learned so much today. Thank you to the third graders at Lincoln Elementary for submitting your big questions. And thank you, Matt, for coming on to teach us today.
Matt: It was awesome. Good job on the questions.
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If you're interested in learning more about baby birds or getting involved with our programs, please head to our website at swibirds.org. From there you can find our free lessons, games and activities as well as check out our event calendar of citizen science programs.
If you have a big nature question that you would like to have answered, please have your grown up or teacher submit your question to info@swibirds.org with the title Questions for QuACK. Make sure to include your grade in the school that you attend so I can give you a shout out on the show. Thanks for tuning in and I hope you join us next time on QuACK!
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Make a donation to Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance
Audio Editing and Transcription by Mickenzee Okon
Logo design by Carolyn Byers and Kaitlin Svabek
Music: “The Forest and the Trees” by Kevin MacLeod
