A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1138 entries
crèche
A crèche is a group of young animals from many different parents gathered together and watched by a few adults while the rest of the parents go off to feed. Emperor and king penguins form the best-known ones, with chicks huddled in the hundreds. Flamingos, terns, eiders, ostriches, and several bats do the same thing. Parents returning with food find and feed their own chick out of the mass, usually by voice.
Etymology
The word is French for a crib or a manger, and it came into English first as the name of a day nursery for working parents’ children. Biologists borrowed it for the animal behavior in the twentieth century. The French word came originally from a Germanic root and is a distant relative of English crib. In British English it still means a daycare, so the ornithological sense is a specialized branch of an ordinary word.
Notes
The recognition problem is the interesting part. An emperor penguin returning to a crèche of hundreds finds its own chick in a crowd, in the dark, in wind, using a call structure with two voices sounding at once that works as a signature. Chicks in a crèche also lose less heat than chicks standing alone, so the arrangement does two jobs.