oxpecker

This book presents a broad overview of animals from around the world that live off blood, including infamous bloodsuckers like mosquitoes and ticks, as wells as lesser known creatures like the Spanish madrilenial butterfly and the red-billed oxpecker. The text conveys scientific information in an easy-to-understand style, and each page has plenty of close range photos of various creeping, crawling, flapping, and swimming animals that suck blood for a living.

An example of mutualism is the relationships between oxpecker and zebra.

At one point, a heavy-bossed bull appeared with an oxpecker dangling precariously about its neck, collecting ticks and other insects that infested the bovine.

Millions of times a day across the African savanna, the red-billed oxpecker alights on the back of a friendly Cape buffalo, who hardly minds the company.

In the African dried-out savannah, Oscar and Spike meet Dora the rhino who has a dispute with Pecky, the oxpecker. The bird flies away, leaving the rhino and her little son without anyone to liberate them from vermin.

As it fed, four red billed oxpecker birds joined in picking at the tics in its skin.

The oxpecker pulls ticks off the giraffe; the seagull pries parasites off the skin of the sunfish; a group of mongoose pick a warthog's skin clean; and a small bird called a plover picks meat scraps from between the teeth of the Nile crocodile.

Breeding biology of the redbilled oxpecker in the Kruger National Park.

So--speaking of bird hunting--it was with some trepidation that I asked Don Causey, publisher of The Hunting Report, why his company was called Oxpecker Publications.

Ornamenting an impala is the red-billed oxpecker in Robin Brandt's picture.

A critical evaluation of the role played by the red-billed oxpecker Buphagus erythrorhynchus in the biological control of ticks.