Let’s explore the diet plan and romantic mating behavior of ostriches.
Ostrich Diet Plan
Most ostriches eat various plants, although certain foods are exclusive to them. They love flowers and a few trees; they also like fruits, seeds, and nuts. Most of the food items associated with ostriches are made up of the edible plants.
Sometimes they consume insects, snakes, lizards, and rodents. They also swallow pebbles and sand which help them grind up their food in their gizzard, a unique, muscular stomach. Because ostriches have this skill to grind almost every food they confume, they can eat things that other mammals cannot digest.
In the wild, ostriches gather nuts from trees, grasses, and twigs and eat the seeds. The grains are gathered from trees and grasses and they eat the seeds, which come in different colors. But there is another kind of diet, which ostriches followed in the wild, which was made up of the roots of different plants. They gather different kinds of roots such as the oats, buckwheat roots, millet, and the roots of different fruits. These roots give them energy and nutrients, which make them strong and healthy.
Ostrich Mating Behavior
Courtship in ostriches is a thrilling affair. The males obtain scarlet coloring on their foreheads, beaks, shins, and necks. They end up romantically chasing each other around in competition and dance alluringly for the females to accomplish dominance. Males will come near females with feathers raised, an exaggerated prancing gait, and then will drop to their lovely knees as if in superb proposal while waving the wings to expose their white tips and bending their necks corkscrew-like.
Ostriches have a unique breeding system amongst birds and are referred to as cooperative breeders. The male is polygamous, he has more than one mate, but within his group of females, there is only one main hen, the rest being minor hens. Of the females, only the principal hen incubates the eggs, and this she does in a tiny scrape in the ground around one to two meters across. She lays her nine or twelve eggs first, and the minor hens add theirs to her collection, possibly upping the total to 50. Usually, the minor hen’s eggs are shifted to the sides, but the parent birds can completely cover at least 20 eggs when they are sitting on the nest, and so there is a good chance that the queen will incubate some of the minor hens’ eggs full term. Excess eggs that may move out of the nest or be poached by the likes of the dangerous hyena are likely to be the minor hens’, and this is probably a helpful insurance policy for the major hen and the reason she allows the minor hens to lay on her turf at all.
