Birds with Ants in their Pants

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Strange by Nature, your guide to the strange, weird, unbelievable and improbable wonders of the natural world.

**Kirk Mona** (0:23)
Hello, everyone, and thanks for being here today. I'm Kirk Mona, and joining me are Rachel Gimza and Victoria Thompson. We're all naturalists who together have scoured the world for weird and wonderful wonders, just to please your mammalian brain's desire for novelty. Isn't that nice?
Let's do this.

**Victoria Thompson** (0:43)
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to the show. Good to be here.

**Rachel Gimza** (0:47)
Oh, it's so good to be here.

**Victoria Thompson** (0:49)
I'm here just with Rachel this evening. Kirk has got some personal stuff going on this week and couldn't make it, so it's just the two of us, but we have some awesome topics here for you. At least mine is awesome.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:01)
Oh, I'm super excited about this, Victoria.

**Victoria Thompson** (1:05)
Okay. Well, I'm going to get us started this week.
And tool use, non-human tool use, of course, is such a fascinating topic in nature.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:16)
Yeah.

**Victoria Thompson** (1:17)
We've talked a little bit about tool use in non-human animals. And today, I'm going to talk about a sort of a variation, animals using other animals as tools.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:30)
I'm sorry.
I feel like the definition of tool should be an inanimate object used to do a task, not using another animal to do a task. That's interesting. What?

**Victoria Thompson** (1:47)
I mean, what would you say to like a horse pulling a carriage? Is that a tool?
I don't know.

**Rachel Gimza** (1:56)
I guess I wouldn't consider them tools, but I think it goes again to what's the definition of a tool, I guess.

**Victoria Thompson** (2:03)
Well, yeah, that is tricky. And in fact, contentious. I'm not going to get into it, but at least not at least not this week.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:12)
A rabbit hole I didn't know to uncover.

**Victoria Thompson** (2:16)
Yeah. This week, I'm talking about birds using ants.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:22)
What? Okay.

**Victoria Thompson** (2:27)
Many species of birds, at least 200, 200 species of birds will on occasion pick up an ant in their beak and rub it over their skin or feathers.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:39)
Okay.

**Victoria Thompson** (2:41)
Yeah. This behavior is-

**Rachel Gimza** (2:43)
Fascinating.

**Victoria Thompson** (2:45)
Yeah. There are actually two main forms of anting.
The one that I just described is called active anting, where a bird picks up an ant or more rarely like a ball of ants, and it's baked and rubs it.

**Rachel Gimza** (2:59)
It feels wild.

**Victoria Thompson** (3:00)
Yeah. The other type is called passive anting, and it's behavior more similar to dust or water bathing.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:09)
Okay.

**Victoria Thompson** (3:09)
Where a bird will just lie on an anthill and let the ants crawl all over it.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:15)
A choice. Not a choice I would make personally.

**Victoria Thompson** (3:20)
No, me either.

**Rachel Gimza** (3:20)
It feels like a bad time.

**Victoria Thompson** (3:23)
Yeah. Or sometimes the bathing will occur in the dust of abandoned anthills. And this just total sidebar. When my son was about 18 months old, we were out in the garden in the backyard.
And I don't know, I was doing some gardening, and I think he was just exploring around. And all of a sudden, he comes over to me very urgently, and he's going, nt, nt, nt, nt. I'm like, what's going on? What's going on? And I suddenly see that he's covered with ants.

**Rachel Gimza** (4:00)
Absolute nightmare.

**Victoria Thompson** (4:03)
He must have started poking in an anthill somewhere.
And nt was his little toddler way of saying, ant. Like, yes, there are a lot of ants. Let's brush these off of you.

**Rachel Gimza** (4:16)
Let's get these off here.

**Victoria Thompson** (4:17)
Yeah, we had to take his clothes off to get it all off.

**Rachel Gimza** (4:21)
I'm not surprised. Oh my gosh.

**Victoria Thompson** (4:24)
So I guess this happens to humans too, but not on purpose as far as I'm aware. But birds do it on purpose.

**Rachel Gimza** (4:32)
Again, a choice.

**Victoria Thompson** (4:34)
Of course, it's kind of strange. This behavior was first described by science in 1831, by none other than John James Audubon. Oh, cool.
Yeah. He noted wild turkeys wallowing in abandoned ant hills. But it's not always the easiest behavior to catch sight of in the wild. And a lot of the observations are pretty anecdotal. There's not a ton of experimental research on the topic.

**Rachel Gimza** (5:04)
Okay. Not surprising.

**Victoria Thompson** (5:07)
Yeah. So of course, the big question here is why?