In reply to HAZY :. Flickr Peak Rambler. In reply to Mike B :. In reply to Watch the Birdie :. Find out more about the partnership. Main website Shop. Site Search User. Watch the Birdie. Share More Cancel. Latest posts. Heron sunbathing When I saw this Heron it made me smile as it looked like it was flashing! Seems like all the birds enjoy a bit of sun, I like the Robin ditting in the background. And when mousebirds, native to sub-Saharan Africa, are looking to dry their cold, damp plumage after rain or heavy dew, they will often sun themselves communally, like wet swimmers lying poolside.
While birds often sun for these practical reasons of warmth and dryness, a growing body of research now points to one largely understudied purpose: to rid themselves of pesky parasites living on their skin and feathers. Birds devote about 9 percent of their time to so-called maintenance behaviors.
They use their bills to pick dirt, mud, and other impurities out of their feathers, and also use them as weapons to hunt for unwanted hitchhikers—parasites, such as feather lice. A feather louse is only about 1 millimeter long, and made of keratin, the same material found in bird feathers as well as human hair and nails. Feather lice are so skilled at hiding amid a bird's feathers that they can be hard to remove by preening alone.
The presence of lice isn't just a hygiene issue—it can make it harder for birds to find mates , possibly due to duller plumage or the need for more frequent preening. Scientists only started studying how sunning dovetails with parasite prevention relatively recently. In , researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University sprayed a sampling of wild Violet-green Swallows with a pesticide used to treat mite and louse infestations in caged birds.
Then, they waited to see how much time the birds spent at their favorite sunbathing spot—the shiny, aluminum roof of the research laboratory. They found that the swallows sprayed with pesticide spent less time sunning themselves than those that were clean, suggesting that the birds probably sunbathe to control their lice.
Exactly how sunlight might kill lice remains unclear, but scientists now believe that short blasts of heat, UV radiation, or some combination of both from the sun's rays is likely the cause.
In a study published a few years after the swallow experiment , a pair of scientists tested this idea out by building a pair of model bird wings, outfitted with real Black Noddy feathers, and infested them with a single louse. The researchers found that even a relatively short time in direct sunlight—around 10 minutes—heated the wings to to degrees Fahrenheit. That far exceeds the temperatures required to kill bedbugs, for example, which die at around degrees.
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