præcocial, a. Ornith.
(priːˈkəʊʃ(ɪ)əl)
Also precocial.
[f. L. præcocēs (C. J. Sundevall 1836, in Kungl. Svenska Vetenskapsakademien Handlingar 1835 70) (pl. of præcox early mature: see precocious), applied in Ornithology to a division of birds: see below.]
Of or pertaining to the Præcoces, applied to those birds whose young are able to leave the nest and to feed themselves as soon as they are hatched; also extended to refer to the young of other animals which are independent soon after birth. Opp. to Altricial.
The classification of Birds into Præcocēs and Altrīcēs, as two primary divisions, introduced by Sundevall, was afterwards abandoned by him; but the adjectives founded upon these terms have been retained as useful in the classification of genera and families. See Newton Dict. Birds, s. vv.
| 1872 Coues Key N. Amer. Birds Index, Præcoces, birds that run about at birth. Præcocial, able to run about at birth. 1883 Century Mag. XXVI. 922 The young [of Wilson's Snipe] leave the nest as soon as they are hatched and follow the mother, or, as the naturalists would say, they are præcocial. 1885 Athenæum 1 Aug. 146/2 There is..no objection to the next in sequence being the præcocial Anseres. 1902 Westm. Gaz. 29 Apr. 2/1 Præcocial birds appear to have much less receptivity than altricial birds. 1932 J. S. Huxley Probl. Relative Growth iii. 90 The same reasoning applies to Ocypoda, whose young are similarly precocial. 1937 Allee & Schmidt tr. Hesse's Ecol. Animal Geogr. xxiii. 484 The young [of water-birds] are praecocial and very soon learn to forage for themselves. 1949 A. Leopold Sand County Almanac i. 35 The hen plover is brooding the four large pointed eggs which will shortly hatch four precocial chicks. 1974 Nature 30 Aug. 732/2 The subject species, Acomys cahirinus (spiny mouse), is a murid rodent whose precocial infants possess functional motor and sensory capabilities within hours of birth. 1978 Sci. Amer. July 107/1 Reid has found that the contents of the kiwi egg are 61 percent yolk, a proportion half again as large as that found in the eggs of typical precocial birds. |