BROWN BELLIED BUG SITTER
Make Believe Journal by Moon Bird It is an averaged size bird, a little bigger than a robin, and usually weighs less than a pound. Most of it's feathers are black and white, similar to a wood pecker. The color of the belly is...did I hear yellow? No, actually it is brown. An unusual feature of this bird is the bill. It is round and flat, similar to a duck's bill, which is very useful to scoop up bugs. Bugs are all that the brown-bellied bug sitter will eat. It is so good at eating bugs that this bird tends to gain a lot of weight. To be honest, it gets very fat by the end of the summer. It is so fat by August or September that it can't bend over fast enough to scoop up bugs, so it sits on them. Once the bugs are flattened and can't get away, the brown-bellied bug sitter continues to eat. These birds would migrate to a warmer climate in the winter, and continue eating bugs if they could, but by fall they are too heavy to fly. They almost became extinct when people thought they were turkeys and began shooting them just before Thanksgiving. They now spend most of the winter in a health spa where they loose all of their extra weight. In the spring, when they are ready to fly, there are plenty of bugs around again so they stay in the same location. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering putting the Bug Sitter on the endangered species list, but they can't decide if the bird is really endangered or perhaps it just knows something that the rest of us do not. Editor's Note |