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Almost two-thirds of all broods of young Aquatic Warblers have more than one father.
Apparently, my family is made up of Aquatic Warblers. (My father always said we didn't have a family tree so much as a rambling vine.)
Male Aquatic Warblers enjoy a carefree lifestyle. They are "completely emancipated from brood care" – in other words, female Aquatic Warblers do all the work of building nests, incubating eggs and feeding young. The males frequently change their ‘activity ranges’ within their large territories, devoting their attentions to different clusters of females. If fertile females are few and far between, the males will cover long distances to find them.
My God, it really is exactly like my family. Although to be fair, the females in my broods "frequently change their activity ranges" too.
The male birds are particularly well endowed (in proportion to their size) with "cloacal protuberances, testes and seminal glomera being extraordinarily large
OK, maybe not exactly like my family.
In all seriousness though, thanks for the post. They're fascinating little birds and it's a shame so many of them have been wiped out.
This organization is way into conservation. All the pages have different birds in the banner graphic, and some of the birds are in trouble. I spent a while looking at that graphic, too.
It's a hell of a conservation site. I'll be reading it for days.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
