My first impression when coming to the Cape, (Cape St. Mary's, NL), was the amount of dead chicks all around. Yo my amazement, I discovered later that this is the way the sleep. with the head dropping down all the way. I even saw one being fed and immediately drop the head ans if being hit with a hammer!
Haha, so the minute you get some food in ya, you'll drop your head on the table juan?? You must have a hard head :D. Very nice behavior capture, didn't know they act like that. Thanks for showing!
Nice Fabs. Thanks for posting. True seabirds like gannets are under huge pressure to deliver the energy required by the chick to the nest. This is because they often have to commute long distances from the food source to the nest. They also have constraints on payload- how much food they can take off, fly and land with. This is why most true seabirds only lay one egg. They cannot bring enough food to the nest to raise more than one chick. On the chick side seabird chicks are adapted to grow and put on mass despite infrequent feeding. They do this through some interesting physiology involving insulin. They lay down huge amounts of fat to get them through periods of infrequent feeding and often end up bigger and heavier than their parents by the end of the development period. Another thing the chicks do is conserve energy and this is what your chick is doing. The perfect situation for a seabird chick is to be thermally neutral- not use any energy to heat or cool their body (parents help with this), and to rest as much as possible.
Dead or alive?
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