Animals do the strangest things, so they say. Take coprophagy for example. Hang on a bit, what’s coprophagy when it’s at home, I hear you ask? It’s the habit of some animals of eating their own dung, a habit that is a necessity in some species. Quite often it arises because their diet is low in food value, and is hard to digest, grass being a good example.
Bovines like cattle, sheep, and deer solve this problem in a different way, by effectively eating their food more than once. This is why they ‘chew the cud’. They sight of a herd of cows lying down in their field contentedly chewing away must be familiar to all of us. They are in fact hard at work regurgitating and chewing balls of grass that they have previously eaten to enable their digestive juices and the countless billions of bacteria helpers that they harbour in their stomachs to extract the maximum food value from their diet. Because of this habit an alternative name for the group is the ruminants.
Even so, there remains an enormous amount of nutrition in the cow pats that eventually emerge from their nether regions. A vast army of mini-beasts invade them and earn their living by disposing of them.
Coprophagy is different and the best example that I know of is the case of the rabbit. Rabbits are voracious eaters as the extensive ‘lawns’ near their warrens testify. The droppings that they produce
Litter the whole area. Just take a minute to look more closely at them and you will see that they are of two types. Some are soft, pale, and of open texture, and fall apart at a touch, while the majority will be the familiar hard round black ones that we as children called ‘currants’.
Watch a group of rabbits closely while feeding, and it will not be long before you see one of them eating the soft ones, which contain a lot of matter that has remained undigested from its first passage through the digestive system. I don’t know about you, but I regard this as a pretty good example of economy in nature, where nothing is ever wasted.
If this isn’t enough there are a group of insects and others which eat the hard black dropping, thus returning all to the natural cycle. Of special interest to me is a species of dor beetle, round and shiny and black, which digs a hole before dragging one of the droppings into it, and laying an egg on it. The ultimate pre-packaged meal, which will keep the grub that hatches going through that part of its life cycle!
As I write on the first day of the month we have had the first hard frost of the winter. The birds are queuing up at the feeders, the miracle being that it is a wonder how some of the smaller ones make it through the intense cold that would kill us if we were exposed for long to such conditions. The obvious point is not to forget them as we approach the festive season. Especially if you are going away on holiday, it is vital that you arrange for feeding to continue. Do not assume that if you put extra food out to cover the time you will be away that the birds will ration it. If the food is there they will eat it!