The pale-breasted thrush in the photograph above is a young father. Isadora Santieff is studying nests on campus as part of her master’s degree in the interior of São Paulo State. She presents threats (a stuffed toucan containing a small speaker that mimics its vocalizations) and food (beetle larvae) to see how birds react when caring for their young. Her data is not yet definitive, but she has observed that in the presence of the supposed predator, feeding stops and the male more actively defends the nest. When the stuffed toucan is removed, the mother returns to feeding her young, while the father appears to bring the same amount of food as before, with no effort to make up for the time the chick went without.
Image submitted by biologist Isadora Santieff, a master’s student at São Paulo State University (UNESP), Rio Claro campus
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