Walk more, be healthier, life lies in strolling...the same goes for birds!

The chicks of the Grey-headed Lapwing are precocial birds, and they can leave the nest and walk after hatching. The difficulty in feeding such chicks is that the legs of the Grey-headed Lapwing grow very long when they are young, which makes the legs of the young birds relatively fragile. If the weight increases too quickly, or the bones are not strong, or the muscles are not well protected, joint problems are likely to occur.

Faced with such a problem, we imitated the growth environment of wild grey-headed lapwing chicks and gave them corresponding feeding strategies.

For chicks with leg problems, the first thing that comes to mind is calcium supplementation, but calcium supplementation alone cannot completely solve the problem because the core problem has not been solved, and the symptoms are only treated, not the root cause. The core problem is: the walking of the chicks.

Life is about strolling

In the wild, chicks must frequently walk and run short distances to find food, and they may need to walk a long way to pick up a bug to eat. This process not only promotes the effective absorption and utilization of calcium, but also exercises leg muscles and enhances joint stability and endurance.

In contrast, in an artificial feeding environment, the easy availability of food reduces the activity of chicks, which may cause muscle development to lag behind bone growth, affecting the overall support structure and coordination, thereby increasing the risk of joint problems. Therefore, allowing the chicks of the gray-headed lapwing to forage for food and encourage them to walk more can allow their joints to grow better and healthier.

First, walking, as a natural form of exercise, can effectively control the rapid weight gain of chicks; second, increasing walking can promote the exercise of leg muscles and enhance the support and protection of muscles on joints;

Walk more, love walking, and get out of the afterimage

In addition, continuous walking during the foraging process simulates the survival state in the wild. This will also avoid the situation of "I'm full after this meal, and then I sit down. Five hours later, I stand up and my weight has increased a lot, but my legs cannot support the sudden increase in weight well." Therefore, letting them walk more is to give the body a certain amount of time to adapt to the gradually increasing weight.

Only after we understand the core issues can we adjust and optimize feeding strategies in a targeted manner around them.

For example, control the total amount and proportion of food, and provide food in small amounts and multiple times to slow down the rate of weight gain, reduce the amount of finished feed with obvious weight gain effects, and increase the proportion of leafy vegetables and fruits;

For example, provide more foods with a high calcium-to-phosphorus ratio, such as shrimps and crane fly larvae that the gray-headed lapwing can eat in the wild. This is more in line with the gray-headed lapwing's natural diet and helps to strengthen the chicks' bones. In addition, provide comfortable straw bedding to protect their leg joints.

The "hair curling machine" for kids

When they are still relatively young and cannot go out to bask in the sun, they can be illuminated by a sun-simulating lamp, which can play the role of basking in the sun. When the gray-headed lapwing is a little older, it will be provided with a cage where it can bask in the sun. Although sunlight itself cannot directly supplement calcium, it is very important to promote the absorption and utilization of calcium.

Since the Grey-headed Lapwing is a migratory bird, they breed and live in Nanjing in the summer, and leave for winter when the autumn wind blows. I hope they can spend a pleasant summer in Nanjing, learn and adapt to the way of survival in the vast wild world. I hope that when autumn comes, they can smoothly embark on the journey of migration, and the cycle will continue endlessly.