Unlikely Friendships : 47 Remarkable Stories From the Animal Kingdom (7 page)

Some friendships start out a little lopsided but soon wobble into balance. So it was with Safi the mutt and her buddy Wister, a young male donkey (or jack) with a reputation for sending canines into hiding, not tempting them into play.

The first time the two met, on remote ranchland in Wyoming, Wister was grazing in a meadow and Safi was on a walk with her owner, Barbara Smuts. Safi approached the unfamiliar creature to investigate. When Wister noticed the dog, he ran at him aggressively, then turned and kicked. Safi danced out of harm's way, then dropped to her haunches to signal her desire to play. But Wister's temper flared again and his sharp feet shot out. It took three air kicks before Safi got the message and backed off.

But Barbara, a biologist who specializes in the study of animal behavior, was intrigued by her pup's fascination with this very different species. So on a day when Wister was safely inside his corral, she gave Safi another try at making friends.

This time, Safi raced up and down the fence, and Wister joined in. Up and back they ran, on parallel paths, the dog sometimes barking or growling as part of her rowdy play, the donkey occasionally offering a startling bray in response. Soon Safi began crossing boundaries and testing limits, diving under the fence and tearing through the corral, darting out the other side when the donkey's attentions got too intense for her.

Then one day after a snowfall, Safi found new confidence and started spending more time inside Wister's enclosure. “She discovered that she could maneuver much better in the snow than the donkey could,” recalls Barbara.

Finally, the pair was able to play outside of the corral entirely, running around like crazy, nipping each other's heels and necks, and making mouth-to-mouth contact. They started drinking from the same bowl and napping together. When Barbara and Safi hiked, Wister followed along. And when Wister was put to pasture each day, he'd come looking for his friend. “At 5:30 in the morning, he'd bray outside the door where Safi and I slept,” Barbara recalls. “It was quite an alarm clock. I'd let Safi out to play and go straight back to bed.”

After four months, Barbara's sabbatical ended and she had to leave Wyoming, which meant Safi had to say good-bye to his friend. “We went back to our regular life, and Safi adapted quickly to playing with her old canine friends,” Barbara says. But Wister, with no other playmates to turn to, suffered the loss greatly. He stopped eating, lost weight, and stood in his corral with his head hung low, uninterested in anything around him. “It showed how truly emotional the donkey–dog relationship had been,” says Barbara.

Concerned for Wister's happiness and health, his owners finally got him a female donkey (a jenny) for companionship. That's a very effective way to get an adolescent male mammal's attention, Barbara says. “Not surprisingly, she cheered him right up!”

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, 2010}

The hurry yellowish one that walks and talks like a duck is a duck. But that other one is a whole different animal.

A six-week-old kookaburra—the largest of the kingfishers, native to Australia and New Guinea—was living solo at the Seaview Wildlife Encounter, located on the Isle of Wight in England. “Our breeding pair of kookaburra has a history of killing its chicks,” says the park director Lorraine Adams. Though last year they reared three healthy babies successfully, “this year the female laid three eggs and killed two hatchlings, so we pulled the last one out to save it.” The survivor was quickly christened Kookie.

Meanwhile, the staff rescued a tiny Madagascar teal duckling,
unable to defend itself against larger birds, from one of the park's aviaries. And Lorraine decided rather than keep the duckling in one enclosure and the kookaburra in another, why not place them together for companionship? As an adult, a kookaburra wouldn't hesitate to eat a little duck, but as a young bird the meat-eater is pretty harmless.

At that point, Kookie wasn't doing much with his days. “Mostly he just sat in his brooder and waited to be fed,” Lorraine says. “When I first put the duckling in, Kookie just continued to sit there. The new arrival immediately cuddled right up, trying to get under Kookie's wing to warm up as he would do if his own mother were there.” Though not terribly responsive, Kookie showed no aggression, so Lorraine felt the experiment was going well.

Still, she thought it best to separate the animals for the night. But when she took the duckling away and put it in a separate brooder, “it jumped up and down at the door, wanting to get back in with Kookie,” she says. In the morning, when the two were reunited, the duckling went right back to cuddling with the larger bird.

Since then, two more ducklings from the same mother have hatched, giving Kookie triplets to contend with. “It's quite an unusual and amazing sight to see three ducks disappear underneath him,” Lorraine says. They don't share food: Ducklings eat a mix of crumbs and egg, while Kookie feasts on dead chicks, mealworms, and minced beef. But when they're not busy foraging, the ducks “are all over Kookie, climbing on his back, sitting on him, or poking their beaks into his feathers and pushing their way under his wings.” Kookie stays put like a good babysitter, taking it all in stride.

Kookaburras are known for their call: The birds will throw back their heads and out will fly a high-pitched cackle that could easily be taken for hysterical human laughter. “When the adults kick off laughing, they can be heard all over the park,” Lorraine says. But in youth, the birds have little to say. So far Kookie, despite the circus of activity in his pen, only makes a back-of-the-throat gurgling noise, she says. Perhaps soon he'll let loose with his first wild guffaw, giving his little teal friends a feather-raising surprise.