This is a follow-up of sorts to my Throwback Thursday post yesterday. That showed how cramped it was getting inside this nestbox.
After posting it occurred to me that I should post a photo showing how the adults keep the nest clean. While in the nest the young produce fecal sacs. These are droppings encased in a gelatinous sac allowing the adults to carry it out of the nestbox and drop it some distance away.
The young stick their bottoms in the air as a sign to an adult that they’re about to produce one.
Interestingly, when I captioned the slides in 1987 the reference books I used spelled it as faecal sac but the accepted spelling nowadays is fecal.
7 replies on “Keeping the nest clean”
Nature is so clever
PS We still use that extra a here!
I did find a couple of modern European references that had dropped the a. Maybe I should continue using it the same way I keep the u in colour and use an s rather than a z in certain words.
Go for it, keep using and confusing your neighbours!
I do that with shopping trolley, it’s a cart over here.
oh yes . . the number of times I have been confused by that! Pavement is the other one 😉
And turn signal rather than indicator, back up rather than reverse. Just to confuse things even more some names/words change between Saskatchewan and Ontario.
Keeps us all on our toes!