Greater racket tailed drongo (Dicrurus paradiseus) is the one of pretty bird according to me. It has full black color with a glossy blue finish on its feathers. It has red eyes that can make you scare if you look straight to its eyes while it looks back to you.
The size is not too big or too small, a bit smaller than pigeon in size. The top of prettiness of this bird is on its tail. There is a couple strand long feather on its tail and make buzzing sound when it fly. Pretty cool ha?
This bird usually life in soliter or in pairs, they didn’t live in big group due to the naughty behavior of it, so will be much easier for its to do the job and launch its strategy to steal the food from another species.
Something makes this bird very unique is its feeding behavior. Clever and foxy often difficult to distinguish. This bird is insectivore. Stealing food from others is it expertise, this bird has a unique behavior that we called “cleptoparatisism”. When you need to steal something, you must be need a good strategy to succeed without any harm to you. So the strategy this bird uses is mimic alarm sound from another species. Drongos use this alarm to deceive it victim by thing thats the alarm is true and there are danger around so this victim will flee away and leave the food. This is the opportunity drongo needs to take the food while the owner if this food not close to defends the food. So tricky, right?
Commonly birds or many species use alarm sound to tell its group or just form of responsive about anything around its habitat includes danger from predator. This drongo use that alarm sound to fool other species by think there are a danger around from preadator or anything and that mean just one thing “this is danger and go away”. But the fact is,, there are no danger thing at all , it was just a sweet drongo mimic alarm sound from victim species, and the sound was really similiar so the victim can not distinguish it as a trap.
The victims run, the food left, the drongo happy. End of story. No fight, no danger, no harm at all. Just the victim get annoyed when realize it just a trick.
In other case drongo can even mimic alarm sound from monkey and fox or wolf, but this case really rare. You can see the video when drongo apply this trick to deceive meerkat group in this link
Credit video by youtube.com
So, cheating and stealing does not apply only to our species of guys. I dont know are the animals that imitate us or we imitate animals.
Now I am actively engaged in doing research on this species, the focus is on the percentage of its success in getting food using the cleptopacitism behavior.
Hopefully this is interesting and useful for those of you who need it. Remember, cheating and stealing is not good to do. Exept to cheat from your ex and try to steal other girls heart. :D
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