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Sunday 31 May 2015

Zombie Tits - a marvel of nature!


Now that you have clicked on the blog, I am sorry to say this has nothing to do with female zombie anatomy but does have everything to do with ornithology. That's right ornithology, you know birds. The feathered kind.



Specifically Parus major or the Great Tit. Called the Great Tit because, as far as Tits go, these are large Tits. 

Turns out that a group of these birds in Hungary got really hungry, for brains. Not just any brains but tasty bat brains. Just like a zombie, the clever Tits worked out how to hunt down a small local bat as it emerged from hibernation. Then the Tits would peck open the bat's skull to gobble up the yummy brains. They did this in winter when food was hard to find.

Péter Estók and Björn Siemers from the Planck Institute in Germany studied this unusual behavior for two winters before publishing their findings in Biology Letters in 2009. If you are not getting enough The Walking Dead there is a few seconds of grainy brain pecking video on the BBC news website. 

I read about it all from the book called Zombie Tits, Astronaut Fish and Other Weird Animals by Sydney based science writer Becky Crew. A delightful book about the wonders of nature, like the vegetarian spider, the tongue chomping isopod and the Pigbutt worm. With creatures like these, zombies don't seem so far fetched after all.


Bite off more bat brains than you can chew

Mr Rimsky

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