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Yellow-billed Oxpecker — printable fact sheet
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Yellow-billed Oxpecker
Buphagus africanus
The yellow-billed oxpecker (Buphagus africanus) is usually presented as the textbook example of mutualism, riding on buffalo, giraffe and rhino and picking off their ticks. The reality is considerably less tidy. Oxpeckers do eat ticks, but they eat blood as well, and they will k…
Did you know?
- Despite their beneficial reputation, Yellow-billed Oxpeckers sometimes peck at wounds to keep them open and feed on blood, which can slow healing for their hosts.
- Oxpeckers drink blood and keep wounds open, and an experiment showed that removing them from cattle did not reduce tick loads but did let wounds heal faster. They act as an alarm system for black rhinos, which are nearly blind: rhinos carrying oxpeckers spotted approaching humans far more often and from much further away. Their Swahili name means "the rhino's guard". They use a stiff tail as a prop against the host's flank, exactly as a woodpecker braces against a trunk.
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