Raising Oneself

Perhaps the most endearing and remarkable thing about the maleo is that, almost unique among birds (thee exceptions being its fellow megapods) it provides no parental care.  The egg is dropped and buried, mother saunters off, and the chick enters the world by digging its way to the surface and then dashing for cover.  It's more like the birth of a sea turtle than a bird.  The chicks are completely self-sufficient.

Oh, what a treat that must be for maleo keepers.  Raising a baby bird can be a very time-consuming, stressful enterprise.

A newly hatched bird can be described one of two ways.  Some species, such as newly hatched songbirds, are altricial.  They enter the world blind, featherless, helpless, basically a tiny pink morsel that mostly consists of a gaping mouth, in constant need of feeding.  Too long between feedings?  The chick dies.  Mom is off the nest for too long and it gets too cold?  The chick dies.  It's a miracle sometimes that there are any birds left in the world and that they don't all die while still in the nest.

The other side of the coin are the precocial birds, of which the maleo is an extreme example.  Waterfowl might be a more reasonable example - shortly after hatching, ducklings are up and about, ready to follow their parents onto the water.

Mammals also appear on the range of the altricial-precocial spectrum, though none are as precocial as the maleo, since all of them them at least need their mothers to give them milk.  Still, there are some species which are helpless for a long period of time (I mean, you'd be hard-pressed to look at a newly born kangaroo joey and tell what the heck it even was), and those that are out trotting at their mom's heels minutes after entering the world.

Reptile and amphibian neonates would appear to be the champion examples of babies raising themselves - but even there, a handful of species (most notably the crocodilians) receive some degree of parental care.

It's the distinctly unbirdlike independence (along with a fascinating appearance) that makes the maleo such an interesting bird.  Though they are fairly uncommon in zoos - as of now, I've only seen them in three US zoos, but it wasn't that long ago they were only in one - I think that their unique breeding biology actually makes them one of the best candidates for zoo-based conservation programs.  One of the major challenges of any reintroduction program is being sure that captive-bred individuals are able to survive in the wild.  This is especially true in birds and mammals, where a fair bit of behavior is learned, perhaps taught by parents.  A bird that raises itself, however, crawling straight from the shell up through the sand and ready to take on the world, is a bird that perhaps is better suited to being able to survive in the wild.

For a critically endangered species like this, it's nice to think that the bird may have something going for it that will help it survive.