Original article (in Croatian) was published on 30/4/2024; Author: Anja Vladisavljević
A picture of an unusual bird from Madagascar is spreading on the internet, accompanied by claims that it is the only bird that does not lay eggs or build a nest.
Social networks, as any active user can confirm, are filled with interesting content from the animal world. Alongside funny snapshots of domestic animals, photos of cute pets, and unusual encounters with animals on the street or in nature, fascinating wild animals from far corners of the world also have their place on social networks.
Among the latter is a post about a very exotic species, so exotic that one reader asked us to check if it was fictional. It is the “Madagascar egg-bearing thrush” which supposedly has one characteristic that distinguishes it from all other birds — it does not lay eggs.
The claim has been circulating in different languages since April of this year (1, 2, 3), and in our language, it was spread by numerous private Facebook users (1, 2, 3, 4) and a little later by the Femina web portal, “intended for women of all ages”.
“Madagascar egg-bearing thrush (Madagascar ovum turdi) is the only bird that does not lay eggs or build a nest. A unique bird that features an incubation in its body.
These birds are small, the size of a sparrow, with brown feathers and a ruddy belly. Omnivorous, they feed on insects, fruits and berries. They live in humid forests and rocky areas of Madagascar. At the end of the pregnancy, the female lays two, and in rare cases three, almost perfectly round eggs in a special skin bag.
After hatching, the lower part of the skin wall thins, the eggs roll-off, and the chicks hatch. The chicks hatch after 2 weeks and are ready to fly within 30 minutes, which is also a unique phenomenon in the bird world”, this is part of an article found on the Femina web portal published on April 26, 2024 (archived here).
Although many users express skepticism and criticize those who “fall for it” under almost every one of these posts, the virality of the content indicates that it still needs to be addressed.
No Evidence Supports the Existence of the Madagascar Egg-Bearing Thrush
Although the description of this bird’s characteristics is elaborately detailed in the text cited above, giving the impression that it was taken from professional literature, we have not found any credible sources confirming the existence of this bird.
A search on Avibase, a database of all the birds of the world, which contains more than 50 million records of 10 thousand species and 22 thousand subspecies of birds, does not give a single result for the entry “Madagascar ovum turdi” (1, 2). It is the same with the Birds of the World database, which contains information on over 11,000 bird species. The platform also does not give results for the same entry, and a Google search engine only returns results that lead to posts from social networks.
Lists of Madagascar’s endemic bird species available online also do not include this bird (1, 2). Additionally, we contacted several domestic and international organizations for further confirmation about the (non)existence of the Madagascar egg-bearing thrush. By the time this article was published, we had received a response from the local association BIOM, a full partner and representative of Croatia in BirdLife International, the global umbrella organization for the protection of birds. They confirmed that this bird species does not exist.
After the publication of the text, the Institute of Ornithology in Zagreb gave us the same confirmation.
The source referred to by the spreaders of this disinformation is “the famous Canadian ornithologist Letitia Balls”, who allegedly described the female Madagascar thrush in her book “Our Unique Planet”. She allegedly stated:
“Given that these small fragile females have to travel about 20,000 km during seasonal migrations, they can rightly be called ‘women with balls’. And not only because of the unusual way of carrying their little ones. Incubation in the body allows them to nest in hard-to-reach places”.
However, an internet search gives very limited results when the name of a “famous” ornithologist is entered into the search engine. More precisely, the search results lead to social networks and disinformation posts.
Some users (for example, the Facebook page Biologist, which publishes in English) also referred to one of this year’s issues of the Wilson Journal of Ornithology. As that magazine is published quarterly, only one issue was published in 2024, and in the summaries of the articles we did not find either ornithologist Letitia Balls, or Madagascar, or a mention of the species Madagascar ovum turdi.
Subsequently, the Wilson Journal of Ornithology replied that they had not published any papers on birds from Madagascar this year. They confirmed that Madagascar ovum turdi does not exist and that “the reproductive mechanism described in the Facebook post has not been documented in birds”. Also, to their knowledge, there is no ornithologist Letitia Balls.
The Bird in the Photo Was AI-Generated
The photo shared with the claim was created using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. It was published on March 26, 2024, on the Instagram profile “dallvador” (1, 2), whose description states: “Exploring the intersection of art and artificial intelligence. All images exclusively generated by DALL·E from OpenAI”. In the description of the visual, there is a story about the imaginary bird TitanNut, which “nature has gifted with a unique talent: attracting attention”. Namely, it attracted attention with its “tiny legs and disproportionately large attributes”.
In the post, there were several variations of the AI-generated visual of the bird, and the one that was most often downloaded and spread for other purposes somewhat resembles (in colour and arrangement of feathers) a real Madagascar bird. It is a bird with the Latin name monticola imerina, and it belongs to the thrush family and lives only in Madagascar. The female of this bird, as is common, builds a nest and lays eggs, usually 2-3 of them.
On the other hand, social media users who accepted the theory about the unusual animal species from Madagascar shared an AI visual explaining that the “big attributes” are actually fertilized eggs that are not laid in the nest but are incubated in that part of the bird’s body.
All birds reproduce by laying eggs which are then incubated by one or both parents alternately. After a certain time, which varies from species to species, the eggs hatch and produce baby birds (1, 2). The phenomenon of a bird that does not lay eggs would certainly not be followed exclusively by the marginal sources on the Internet. Animal species that belong to one class, but have the characteristics of another, have always attracted special interest from both scientists and the general public. For example, it is widely known that the only mammals that fly are bats, or that the platypus is an egg-laying mammal.
In the end, it is not unusual that Madagascar was taken as the habitat of this non-existent thrush. This island country, which lies along the southeastern coast of Africa, is home to 25 thousand wild animals. Due to the island’s isolation, many animal primitive forms survived and evolved into unique forms. Most of these species found in Madagascar are endemic, meaning they cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
Among them, however, is not the Madagascar egg-bearing thrush.
