Who Put Brains in the Eggs?

It may be a confusing name for a bird, but the name is Killdeer and it is a cute little bird with some fascinating traits.

Both dad and mom share sitting on the eggs for a month until they hatch walking their first day.

Their nests are on the ground or by the water and the eggs look like speckled grey rocks. Good camouflage. The water is no danger because they float just like baby ducks even though their feet are not webbed.

Who decided the eggs should be speckled?

Who made killdeer able to float in the water? Was it the mother? The father? Grandpa? Well, all the eggs often placed among the rocks are conveniently speckled.

The mother is the one who risks her life by attracting predators to herself as a wounded bird. A photo will not do it justice. You can watch YouTube for samples of Killdeer moms making noise and running away from the nest and then flattening herself on the ground as if injured with one or both wings broken. She suddenly looks like an easy catch … until you get close, then she runs again drawing you further away from the nest. If you ignore her and walk back toward the nest, she will also run toward you, squawking to get your attention and repeat the same routine, offering herself as an easy meal to distract you from her eggs.

It is a smart trick and species-specific, which means it is in her genes and she does it by instinct.

Mother squirrels don’t fake injury, either do penguins. It is not an idea of the mother, but a program that is smarter than you or I. The trick may not be smarter than us, unless as hungry people we are fooled and never find the eggs. But we don’t know how to find and transplant this program to another species of luring predators with noise, running away and faking an injury. It will never occur to a blue jay.

It must be coded in the DNA, I guess. If we can ever find the precise coding, that program is still smarter than us, because we can only copy and clone.

These inventions precede us and if we humans are the smartest species on earth, and this program is smarter than us humans, then it logical to assume there is someone smarter than us. Unless it seems logical to you that if man is not the inventor, it can only be an accident.