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How Baby Wild Animals Learn.
With Guest: Susan McCarthy, author of "Becoming A Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild."
Original Air Date: 02-12-2010
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In today's episode, you'll hear Susan McCarthy tell numerous stories of how baby wild animals must learn the skills they need to thrive and grow. Contrary to what you might have thought, many things the baby animal needs to know about how to find food, communicate or even know how to be the animal it is, is not hardwired or instinctual. And through these stories, there are surprising elements that are common to all learning creatures. Following are the photos of just some of the animals we will be talking about during this show.
(photo courtesy of Harper Collins Publishers)
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A Tiger moving her cub for safety.
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A Siberian Tiger cub trying to catch some fish.
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A Pair of Fisher's Lovebirds
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Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin and her calf.
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A cat that has got itself stuck in a tree.
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A child carefully holds a baby robin who fell from its nest.
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An Elephant calf playing with its trunk.
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Baby elephant playing in mud in Kenya.
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A baby elephant searching for its mother at a waterhole.
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An Orangutan demonstrates its dexterity in the trees.
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European River Otters.
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Young Whooping Cranes completing their first migration from Wisconsin to Florida by following an ultralight aircraft. This was carried out by "Operation Migration." See resource section below.
(photo by Tim Ross, Wikipedia, public domain)
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The Kea Mountain Parrot, from New Zealand, known to be a very "playful" bird.
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A New Zealand Kea preparing to attack a car. These birds are famous for attacking the cars of unwary travelers and ripping out any rubber seals and windscreen wipers. Nevertheless, it is very popular with tourists, who often deliberately park their cars in Kea areas and stand back to watch the fun.
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Bottlenose Dolphins jumping out of the water in the wild.
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Newborn baby chicks in an incubator. My father, while attending night school, for one of his classes brought home a baby chick that imprinted on him. The chick thought my dad was its mother.
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A four week old Orangutan being looked after at a sanctuary in Malaysia. They have the baby in diapers as things seem to get very messy otherwise.
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A dachshund acts as a foster mom to a baby pig. This is Tink, the dachshund and Pink, a pig. Tink, who adopted the pig, keeps its close to her.
(photo by Joanna Kerby)
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This is "Pink", short for Pig and Tink with its sibling puppies.
(photo by Joanna Kerby)
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Anjana, a chimpanzee and a tiger cub.
(photo by Primatology.net) See this website for more information.
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A Golden Eagle lands on a rock pinnacle.
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These are golden eagle chicks, what the eagles babies should look like.
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This is a gosling foraging for food. One such gosling was adopted by a golden eagle.
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A baby Black Vervet monkey sitting in a tree in the wild in Zimbabwe.
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A Zebra Finch.
(photo by Peripitus, Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation)
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A baby black bear.
!YellowBall:28 A domestic cat stalking, on the hunt.
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A Cheetah must learn from its mother how to hunt.
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Mom and baby Squirrel Monkeys.
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A family of Thompson's Gazelles.
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A British Red Fox.
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A white-tailed deer fawn hides in the grass.
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An abandoned Owlet. If a baby is separated from its parents there can be many consequences in what the baby learns or does not learn.
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A female Gorilla functioning as a good mother to its baby.
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A baby bird, ready to take on the world.
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A baby Gorilla peeks from behind its parent.
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 Susan McCarthy is the co-author of WhenElephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals and author of Becoming a Tiger: How Baby Animals Learn to Live in the Wild. A science writer and a humor writer, she especially loves true stories that illuminate animal behavior, and give us hints of what goes on in their hearts and minds.
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Additional Resources
For more information about the birds that followed the ultralight aircraft. See "Operation Migration."
Here is a bit more information to fill out the caption for the photo of the chimp and the white tiger cub. Also, see the YouTube video about Anjana and the cub on my talkzone.com show home page.
Anjana, a chimpanzee who takes care of wild feline cubs at the Institute of Greatly Endangered Species in South Carolina, adopted Mitra and Shiva, two baby white tigers who survived a hurricane and were separated from their mother. The two year old chimp is providing the orphan cubs cuddles and affection they need from a mother.
Besides tigers, Anjana has raised both lions and leopards. Her zoo keeper China York has Anjana assist her to care for the tigers, bottle feed them milk and accompany and play with them constantly. Anjana picks up cub raising tricks from her zoo keeper, mimicking how China looks after the cubs and does the same things to the baby big cats himself. Monkey see, monkey do.
The bond between Anjana and the cubs is fascinating. They are inseparable. Even though big cats play rough, Anjana has really thick skin which protects her from getting hurt. In fact, chimps are stronger than these cubs, so it is a no brainer for Anjana to jump in to help and provide a plethora of motherly love to these precious orphan cat babies.
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