While it is fun to go birdwatching and see lots of different species, I find just watching the behaviour of birds, even in my own backyard, equally exciting.
Over the 45 years I have lived here, I have noticed quite a few behavioural changes, some of which are examples of birds adapting to new situations.
Years ago, we rarely saw northern flickers staying here over the winter, but now we see some of them every year throughout the winter.
Downy and hairy woodpeckers, on the other hand, have always been winter residents here. But all three of them have changed some of their feeding habits from pecking at tree bark for insects and more recently coming to fat feeders to becoming seed eaters.
They must have been watching the chickadees and nuthatches and maybe thinking how good those seed feeders look.
At first, the woodpeckers would take the black-oil sunflower seeds from the feeder, stick it into some tree bark and then pound it with their beaks until they broke open the husk and accessed the yummy seed inside.
Now, I notice some of them stay on the feeder and manipulate the seed in their beaks until they break it open.
Recently a friend phoned me to tell me that one of her downy woodpeckers has figured out how to get the sugar mix out of her hummingbird feeder. So now it is a nectar eater, a seed eater, as well as, an insect and fat eater.
I can’t help wondering if this could lead to a downy woodpecker liking the sugar high so much that it might discover flowers have nectar and then… become a flower pollinator! You just never know.
A couple of weeks ago we put out our last block of fat mixed with seeds – high enough on a rope stretched between two trees that ‘Blackie’ could not get at it. Lo and behold, the white-crowned sparrows cottoned on that this new feeder was more fun (rewarding?) than searching for seeds on the ground and we would see three or four of them fighting over it.
It was not long before the juncos, purple finches, nuthatches, and chickadees joined them – all politely lining up along the rope waiting their turn.
Then, a really big surprise occurred when the yellow-rumped warblers, which are normally aerial insectivores, decided to join them in the line-up.
Finally, along came the sweet mountain chickadee who deliberately ruffled the feathers (figuratively speaking) of the other species and chased all of them away. What fun!
