Quote:
Originally Posted by graciegirl
What they were doing was inserting their beaks into the green and removing the insect, grub, critter they were looking for.
You know as well as I do that lunching on the green is a very rare occurrence as they have the whole bloomin' golf course and all of the lawns to find their wormies.
They aren't like pitbulls. What they are, are Sandhill Cranes with beautiful long legs and gorgeous bright red heads and they mate for life. My husband and I are doing the "mate for life" and it is working for us. BUT... We didn't have the red heads and HE has the beautiful legs.
Just sayin'.
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Actually, most bird species “mate for life,” in that they will raise their brood together year after year, but most of those, both male and female, seek out or accept sex with other birds. They “get some on the side.” (Perhaps it is in the DNA, or at least in the DNA of more than half of all humans and most birds and mammals.)
There is an interesting doctoral dissertation on sandhill cranes available at this government web site.
https://www.fws.gov/migratorybirds/p...l%20Cranes.pdf
It seems that while they “mate for life,” a sizable percentage also get divorced! Sometimes that’s because they don’t get along, or because they don’t have breeding success, but sometimes it is because another bird butts in and one of the pair takes off with it. If this happens, they usually move to the nearest available space. (They tend to want almost a kilometer to a family.) I think about three fourths that show up with new mates are re-matings because one of the pair has died, and one fourth of the banded birds examined got divorced. It seems that they nearly always find another mate, preferably not far away. They don’t usually try to live alone in their own territory. “It is not good for birds to be alone.”
Here is a quote from chapter 2 of the dissertation.