Unlikely Friendships - Jennifer S. Holland [9]
Then one day after a snowfall, Safi found new confidence and started spending more time inside Wister’s enclosure. “She discovered that she could maneuver much better in the snow than the donkey could,” recalls Barbara.
Finally, the pair was able to play outside of the corral entirely, running around like crazy, nipping each other’s heels and necks, and making mouth-to-mouth contact. They started drinking from the same bowl and napping together. When Barbara and Safi hiked, Wister followed along. And when Wister was put to pasture each day, he’d come looking for his friend. “At 5:30 in the morning, he’d bray outside the door where Safi and I slept,” Barbara recalls. “It was quite an alarm clock. I’d let Safi out to play and go straight back to bed.”
After four months, Barbara’s sabbatical ended and she had to leave Wyoming, which meant Safi had to say good-bye to his friend. “We went back to our regular life, and Safi adapted quickly to playing with her old canine friends,” Barbara says. But Wister, with no other playmates to turn to, suffered the loss greatly. He stopped eating, lost weight, and stood in his corral with his head hung low, uninterested in anything around him. “It showed how truly emotional the donkey–dog relationship had been,” says Barbara.
Concerned for Wister’s happiness and health, his owners finally got him a female donkey (a jenny) for companionship. That’s a very effective way to get an adolescent male mammal’s attention, Barbara says. “Not surprisingly, she cheered him right up!”
{ENGLAND, 2010}
The Duckling and the Kookaburra
KOOKABURRA
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Aves
ORDER: Coraciiformes
FAMILY: Halcyonidae
GENUS: Dacelo
SPECIES: Dacelo novaeguineae
MADAGASCAR TEAL DUCK
KINGDOM: Animalia
PHYLUM: Chordata
CLASS: Aves
ORDER: Anseriformes
FAMILY: Anatidae
GENUS: Anas
SPECIES: Anas bernieri
The hurry yellowish one that walks and talks like a duck is a duck. But that other one is a whole different animal.
A six-week-old kookaburra—the largest of the kingfishers, native to Australia and New Guinea—was living solo at the Seaview Wildlife Encounter, located on the Isle of Wight in England. “Our breeding pair of kookaburra has a history of killing its chicks,” says the park director Lorraine Adams. Though last year they reared three healthy babies successfully, “this year the female laid three eggs and killed two hatchlings, so we pulled the last one out to save it.” The survivor was quickly christened Kookie.
Meanwhile, the staff rescued a tiny Madagascar teal duckling, unable to defend itself against larger birds, from one of the park’s aviaries. And Lorraine decided rather than keep the duckling in one enclosure and the kookaburra in another, why not place them together for companionship? As an adult, a kookaburra wouldn’t hesitate to eat a little duck, but as a young bird the meat-eater is pretty harmless.
At that point, Kookie wasn’t doing much with his days. “Mostly he just sat in his brooder and waited to be fed,” Lorraine says. “When I first put the duckling in, Kookie just continued to sit there. The new arrival immediately cuddled right up, trying to get under Kookie’s wing to warm up as he would do if his own mother were there.” Though not terribly responsive, Kookie showed no aggression, so Lorraine felt the experiment was going well.
Still, she thought it best to separate the animals for the night. But when she took the duckling away and put it in a separate brooder, “it jumped up and down at the door, wanting to get back in with Kookie,” she says. In the morning, when the two were reunited, the duckling went right back to cuddling with the larger bird.
Since then, two more ducklings from the same mother have hatched, giving Kookie triplets to contend with. “It’s quite an unusual and amazing sight to see three ducks disappear underneath him,” Lorraine says. They don’t share food: Ducklings eat a mix of crumbs and egg, while Kookie feasts on dead chicks, mealworms,