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Headline: Toucan Steals Chick From Nest

Caption: A cheeky toucan used its long beak as a tool to sneak a snack from a nest. Joe Cockram, a 32-year-old naturalist from Somerset, captured the scene in the Peruvian Amazon this month (Oct) as the White-throated Toucan flew off with an unfortunate Cacique chick. He explains: “I’m currently volunteering at an Amazonian ecolodge called Explorer’s Inn, in Tambopata National Reserve, Southeast Peru. My role here is to identify and catalogue the birds in the jungle reserve owned by the lodge and to train the local guides as bird guides. “Immediately outside the lodge is a tree with a nesting colony of Yellow-rumped Caciques, which are in the ‘new-world blackbirds’ family. Like Weaver birds in Africa, they weave nests from grasses, which hang pendulously from the upper branches of the tree. I wake early every day, around 5am as sunrise is the best time to find birds in the jungle, so I was having an afternoon siesta when I was woken by the sound of hundreds of screeching Caciques, obviously something was attacking their nests. I rushed outside with my camera to see a White-throated Toucan raiding one of the nests. The enormous, razor-edged beak of the Toucan is usually used to pull fruit and nuts from branches, but this one had worked out that it was the perfect tool for reaching down into the woven nests to pull out recently hatched Cacique chicks. It quickly extracted a chick and flew off into the jungle, hotly pursued by angry adult Caciques.”

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