CaveBuck
Terminally Chill
In 2015, Harold Francis Greeney III, an American biologist trained his camera on a mourning dove nest stitched into the crook of a cactus. As an ornithologist, Greeney studies the love lives of birds—cooperative breeding in nightingale-thrushes, parenting strategies of spotted barbtails, breeding biology in speckled hummingbirds, you name it. His goal that day was to capture the breeding habits of doves in an urban setting. Instead, he captured perhaps the most horrifying bird-on-bird behavior the world has ever seen.
The video opens on what appears to be a lovely day in Tucson, Arizona. Birds chatter in the background, and a pair of mourning dove chicks warm themselves in the day’s new rays. For six glorious seconds, the scene is full of beauty and promise. Then another bird lights upon the edge of the nest. This bird is no Mother Dove returning with a breakfast of seeds and crop milk: It’s a Gila woodpecker, with wings of barred black and white and a long, sharp beak. And it's come in search of a meal of its own.
What happens next may upset you (and in fact, if you’re sensitive to bird-on-bird violence, you may want to stop reading here). Before the chicks even realize there’s an enemy at the gates, the woodpecker cocks its head back and starts to peck … their skulls. The Gila’s head moves like a pneumatic hammer, up and down, up and down, drilling into flesh and bone with the force of 1,000 G's. Soon both chicks’ skulls have been opened up like coconuts. At this point, the woodpecker begins extracting brain and blood with its long, sticky tongue.
The whole assault lasts less than three minutes. Then one of the adult doves returns to find the avian equivalent of Hannibal Lecter carving up its young, one of which has already tumbled from the nest in a braindead daze. At no point does the woodpecker appear to deal the chicks a death blow. Yet while each continues to thrash and cower throughout the affair—which almost makes it worse for the viewer, and doubtlessly the chicks—their doom is abundantly clear.
It’s a profoundly disturbing, vicious scene. But from a scientist’s perspective, it’s also an amazing find. As far as Greeney can tell, no one has ever filmed this behavior before.
Greeney has a possible explanation as to what’s happening—but it probably won't make you feel any better. When Gila woodpeckers get thirsty, he speculates, they crack open a couple of nestling heads like you or I might open a six-pack. “My guess is that these woodpeckers, like most birds in the Sonoran Desert, are fluid or water stressed,” he says. “This woodpecker appears to me to be clearly targeting the heads of the nestlings, and thus purposefully opening them to drink fluid—and this may be something that happens more often than is documented.”
The video opens on what appears to be a lovely day in Tucson, Arizona. Birds chatter in the background, and a pair of mourning dove chicks warm themselves in the day’s new rays. For six glorious seconds, the scene is full of beauty and promise. Then another bird lights upon the edge of the nest. This bird is no Mother Dove returning with a breakfast of seeds and crop milk: It’s a Gila woodpecker, with wings of barred black and white and a long, sharp beak. And it's come in search of a meal of its own.
What happens next may upset you (and in fact, if you’re sensitive to bird-on-bird violence, you may want to stop reading here). Before the chicks even realize there’s an enemy at the gates, the woodpecker cocks its head back and starts to peck … their skulls. The Gila’s head moves like a pneumatic hammer, up and down, up and down, drilling into flesh and bone with the force of 1,000 G's. Soon both chicks’ skulls have been opened up like coconuts. At this point, the woodpecker begins extracting brain and blood with its long, sticky tongue.
The whole assault lasts less than three minutes. Then one of the adult doves returns to find the avian equivalent of Hannibal Lecter carving up its young, one of which has already tumbled from the nest in a braindead daze. At no point does the woodpecker appear to deal the chicks a death blow. Yet while each continues to thrash and cower throughout the affair—which almost makes it worse for the viewer, and doubtlessly the chicks—their doom is abundantly clear.
It’s a profoundly disturbing, vicious scene. But from a scientist’s perspective, it’s also an amazing find. As far as Greeney can tell, no one has ever filmed this behavior before.
Greeney has a possible explanation as to what’s happening—but it probably won't make you feel any better. When Gila woodpeckers get thirsty, he speculates, they crack open a couple of nestling heads like you or I might open a six-pack. “My guess is that these woodpeckers, like most birds in the Sonoran Desert, are fluid or water stressed,” he says. “This woodpecker appears to me to be clearly targeting the heads of the nestlings, and thus purposefully opening them to drink fluid—and this may be something that happens more often than is documented.”
