#oxpeckers

[camelidae]

Naturally these ox-peckers are hanging around purely for the conversation – a tick wouldn’t dare feed off a unicorn. It would be impolite.

[antiqueanimals]

Nature's Marvels. Text by Lucy Berman. Illustrations by Roy Coombs. 1971.

Internet Archive

[snototter]

A red-billed oxpecker (Buphagus erythrorynchus) sits atop a zebra in Hluhluwe National Park, South Africa

by Derek Keats

[larajeandoodles]

Husband: draw a hippo with the birds on its hat. In suspenders.

Me: yep, done.

[andmaybegayer]

it is presently real oxpecker hours

Yellow (top) and Red (bottom) Billed Oxpeckers bothering some giraffes, Kruger National Park.

Yellow Billed Oxpeckers went extinct in South Africa back in the late 1800's but they have slowly reintroduced themselves over the years without much human intervention. They're grossly understudied, I think there's like two people doing serious research on their nesting and dietary habits. Despite being listed as Of Least Concern, spotting one is still a rarity and their ranges have constricted significantly elsewhere on the continent. This is the first time I've seen one in almost a decade.

[splintergirl13]

Day 14: tick

Tickbirds and rhinos are always a pair 🎶

[psikonauti]

Yellow Billed Oxpeckers on the Back of a Giraffe by Claudio Bacinell

[sciencenewsforstudents]

Hitchhiking oxpeckers warn endangered rhinos when people are nearby

Red-billed oxpeckers do more than just eat parasites from rhinos’ backs. The birds can alert the hunted mammals to potential danger, a study finds.

Red-billed oxpeckers hitching rides on the backs of black rhinos are a common sight in the African bush. The birds are best known for feeding from lesions full of ticks or other parasites on a rhino’s hide. But new research suggests that the relationship between the two species is much more mutualistic (SN: 10/9/02). Shouty and shrill oxpeckers can serve as an alarm bell, alerting black rhinos to the presence of people, scientists report April 9 in Current Biology. That could help the endangered animals evade poachers, the researchers propose.

“Rhinos are as blind as bats,” explains Roan Plotz, a behavioral ecologist at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Even in close proximity, a rhino might struggle to notice lurking danger by sight. But the oxpecker easily can, unleashing a sharp call to warn of intruders.

In South Africa’s Hluhluwe–iMfolozi Park, Plotz and his colleague Wayne Linklater of California State University, Sacramento approached 11 black rhinos (Diceros bicornis) by foot on the open plain on 86 occasions. The team found that those rhinos with a red-billed oxpecker (Buphagus erythrorhynchus) tagging along were much better at detecting the researchers’ presence than those without.

“Rhinos without oxpeckers on their back were able to detect our approaches just 23 percent of the time whereas rhinos with oxpeckers detected them every single time,” Plotz says. Rhinos listening to an oxpecker’s heads-up also picked up on the approaching scientists from 61 meters away, more than twice as far as when the rhinos were alone.