Photo: Wu Gang
As we all know, in the brooding stage, the chicks eat and drink Lasa, and the nest is easily dirty. If the bird parents are not diligent in cleaning up, bacteria and parasites will breed, which will have a negative impact on the baby's health.
How do you keep your home clean? Birds have their own tricks.
There is a bird called the Dongmei Horned Owl, which uses blind snakes as household cleaners. Yes, that's right, snakes do cleaning!
The Dongmei horned owl is a small owl with an adult body length of 25 cm and dark red or dark gray patterns of abdominal feathers. Small and strong, with a short, broad tail, large and rounded head, yellow eyes, and pale yellow tail feathers. Dark red is more widely distributed in the southern United States, and there is a light gray variant in western Canada and the northern Central United States.
The Dongmei Horned Owl nests in trees. It is only active at night, resting in the nest or on the trunk of a tree on the side during the day.
Generally speaking, before it takes reptile prey back to the nest to feed the birds during the breeding period, it will break the head of the prey for safety reasons, kill the prey and bring it back to the nest to avoid harming the young birds, but it is kind to the Texas fine blind snake.
Texas fine blind snake
The Texas spotted blind snake is a species of snake in the suborder Ceratophyllaceae , found in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. The appearance is like an earthworm with a shining body. The body color is pink and brown, the scales are shiny, the body is segmented, the eyes degenerate into two black spots, covered by the scales of the head, and the mouth is small. An adult Texas slender blind snake with a body length of only about 20 centimeters.
The Texas fine blind snake itself is an animal that poses no threat to owls. Most of the time it lurks in loose silt and only reaches the ground when foraging or when rainwater infiltrates the settlement. It mainly feeds on ants and termites. In spring, it is sometimes mistaken for earthworms.
If blind snakes are caught, they will try to poke at each other with the end of their tails. It's not aggressive, it's just to grab the other person's attention in an attempt to get out. The mouth is too small to pose any threat to the owl.
Once the blind snake is thrown into the nest, it not only does not harm the chicks, but also eats the ants, flies, other insects and their larvae or pupae in the nest. Chicks that grow under the protection of blind snakes grow faster and have a much higher survival rate than those that don't have the help of blind snakes.
From this point of view, choosing a good family cleaner is very important.
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The images are from Wikipedia unless noted
Compilation: Horse chestnut