1. Today, we're going to continue our discussion of the parenting behaviors of birds, and we're gonna start by talking about what known as distraction displays. Now, if you're a bird, and there is predator around, what do you going to do? Well, for one thing you're going to try to attract as little attention as possible, right? Because if the predator doesn't know you're there, it's not going to try to eat you.
2. Now, why will they do that? Well, they do that to draw the predator away from their nest, away from their eggs or young birds, and the behaviors that the bird engage in to distract predators are called distraction displays, and there are a number of different kinds of distraction displays, most of the time, when birds are engaging in distraction displays, they are going to be pretending either that they have an injury or that they’re ill or that they’re exhausted.
3. One pretty common distraction display was called the broken wing display, and in a broken wing display, the bird spreads and drags its wing or its tail, and while it does that, it slowly moves away from the nest, so it really looks like a bird with a broken wing, and these broken wing displays can be pretty convincing.
4. Now what’s interesting is that birds have different levels of performance of these distraction displays, they don’t give their top performance, their prime time performance every time, what they do is they save their best performances, their most conspicuous and most risky displays, for the time just before the baby birds become able to take care of themselves.
5. Now, a number of things happen when an oral tale gets written down, first, the language changes, it becomes more formal, more standard, some might say, less colorful, it's like the difference in your language depending on whether you are talking to someone, or writing them a letter, second, when an orally transmitted story is written down, an authoritative version with are cognized author is created. The communal aspect gets lost, the tale no longer belongs to the community, it belongs to the world, so to speak.
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