Animal hygiene: Keeping clean

An elephant uses its trunk, while the flexible neck of a bird allows its bill-tip to clean parts of its body.

Most cleaning in the animal world is restricted to cleaning hair, feathers, lips, hooves, claws, etc of dirt or organic materials.

The bill and head cleaning involves two basic patterns.

In direct preening, one of the legs of the bird is first moved towards the bill-head or under the wing and then the claws are used to scratch.

Most small and passerine or perching or song birds do this.

But most large and non-passerine birds do this indirectly. A large non-passerine bird will often bring its leg over the wing, by stretching or pushing outwardly.

During a recent bird-watching trip, I discovered many birds congregating in a pool of accumulated irrigation water.

One of these birds, a white-tailed lapwing, suddenly stood upright, moved its right-side wings horizontally, bent its leg, brought it over its shoulder and started scratching its head.

The process was too quick to notice and was repeated several times.