Pecking Order and the Mob

When a redbelly comes by, everything else scatters
 (Margo D. Beller)

Not long after putting out the house-shaped feeder the other morning, a male cardinal came by for a few seeds. He was soon followed by three house finches, two of them male. They sat atop the feeder while the cardinal sat and ate. One of the male house finches found its way to the other side of the feeder and started to eat, until a female downy woodpecker showed up and chased him off. She grabbed her seed and flew off to either eat it or hide it somewhere for another time. The house finch tried again, only to be chased off by the returning downy.

Meanwhile, the cardinal stayed put and pecked at the other house finches if they tried to take a seed from his side. When he would grab a seed and jump up on top of the feeder pole to eat - his usual habit - he would quickly jump down and chase off the finches if they came down for seeds. It was only when the larger, more aggressive blue jay came in that the cardinal left, along with the finches. When the jay flew off, the finches returned. A female cardinal came to eat on the other side from where the jay had been. She, however, allowed the house finches to grab seeds and take off.

Titmouse about to be chased off by a white-breasted nuthatch
(Margo D. Beller)

Then the titmice started arriving, grabbing seeds and flying off between visits by the jay. Finally, a redbellied woodpecker flew in, scattering the female cardinal and the smaller birds, including some house sparrows and juncos that had been attracted to my yard by all the action.

Why am I detailing this?

Because it illustrates two different types of bird behavior - the pecking order and mobbing.

Cornell University's Ornithology Lab published an interesting article at the end of 2018 about which birds are "top dog" when many converge on the same feeder. (Pecking orders are also found within the same bird species, but that's a topic for another post.) Usually, size matters, as the example of the male cardinal chasing off the house finches shows. Sex might matter, too, as shown by the female cardinal that was not as aggressive toward the house finches as her mate.

Cooper's hawk looking for
birds at the feeder
(Margo D. Beller)

However, behavior is also important. Jays are more aggressive than cardinals and sometimes even woodpeckers, in my observations. Small titmice and chickadees will hang back but then zip in and grab a seed to take elsewhere when given an opportunity. The small white-breasted nuthatch will take a seed and go, but it will also chase out slightly larger birds and sometimes spread its wings and try to make itself look bigger to keep other birds away when it is trying to get a seed.

As for the feeder mobbing, to me it seems when a big, colorful bird - jay, cardinal, redbelly - comes to the feeder, this is when all the other, smaller birds in the area want to show up and then start mobbing the feeders once the bigger birds are gone. In my example, this is what happened when the house sparrows and juncos showed up. It is a sort of feeding frenzy where these birds may fear getting nothing with the big guys around and so rush in en masse once they get a chance.

At some point, when the cardinals, jays and woodpeckers must've had their fill, the house sparrows and house finches, which will sit and eat and do little else, must've come back because I found the feeder nearly empty when I took it in at night. It is the reason why, until this recent mild weather, I usually put out at least one other feeder that only small birds can use to let them eat when the bigger birds swoop in.

Of course, when the raptors show up for a meal they aren't looking for seed, they're looking for the birds at my feeder. Then the mob disperses and the pecking order is forgotten for the moment.

High-Flying Vultures

It is a cold morning made colder by a strong wind. Where I am walking - an old railroad embankment now a paved, linear park - the river barely ripples because the trees on either side are blocking the wind from it and me. Only a pair of mallard ducks are on the river, more disturbed by me standing still and looking at them than the people running along the path, with and without dogs.

Turkey vulture, Sandy Hook, NJ, 2018 (RE Berg-Andersson)

There is not much else going on in the wind aside from a brief call by a jay. Then I look up and there is my third turkey vulture of the morning.

I have written about turkey vultures in the past. I've always been impressed by how an ungainly, ugly bird that lives on dead animals looks so graceful and majestic when it flies. Its wide wings are held back, making it look like a giant V in the sky. I heard Pete Dunne describe turkey vultures once as a man walking a tightrope, his arms held up to keep his balance. It is an accurate description.

In a strong wind a turkey vulture wobbles as it fights to stay aloft and in the direction it wants to go. On days like this, turkey vultures are the only birds I expect to see flying. Others, even redtailed hawks, are more likely to stay in the bushes or perched in the low branches of a tree to stay out of the wind.

Why do turkey vultures fly in gusty winds? To eat, naturally. But hawks need to eat, too, and I don't usually see them in gales. I went looking through the internet and found this explanation, which you can believe or not:

One way of looking at the flight behavior of Turkey Vultures, is that they are the one species which flies “with” the wind, while other raptors fly “through” the wind. 

That's one way to look at it, although I've seen plenty of hawks flying "with" rather than "through" the wind. The experts at Cornell's Ornithology Lab note these vultures fly low and slow to smell out carrion, so perhaps the high winds are bringing the smells of breakfast to wherever the big birds roosted for the night, prompting them to take off.

Vultures aloft, Sandy Hook, NJ, December 2019
(RE Berg-Andersson)

Turkey vultures like wide-open spaces, so unless you have a particularly big yard with something dead in it, you are not likely to find them there. (I have never hosted turkey vultures in my yard except one spring, after the snow had melted, when they found a dead, frozen rabbit the day after I did. I made sure they took their snack elsewhere.)

Finding them sunning themselves on your roof on a cold winter morning or roosting in large numbers in your large trees is another matter.  I've seen many such vulture roosts, some in my neighborhood. As you would expect, most people don't want these reminders of death hanging around their roofs or trees because, as with all creatures, what goes in one orifice eventually comes out another, and 70 pooping vultures can make quite a mess.

Better to watch them aloft in the wind, doing what they must to survive.

New Year, Old Birds

I'd like to state for the record that my first bird on the first day of the first month of 2020 was a male cardinal at the house feeder. As usual he came, took a seed and then ate it from the top of the feeder pole. When finished, he took another and went back to the top of the pole. I don't know why he doesn't just sit in the feeder unless it is to watch for other cardinals or predators.

Female bufflehead duck, Sandy Hook, NJ (RE Berg-Andersson)

There is a tradition among birders that on the first day of the new year they go out and record the birds they see. For many, they are getting ready to embark on a Big Year where they set a goal of seeing as many birds as possible in a year, be it in one place or around the world. Others, however, just like making lists of what birds they see and when. This isn't necessarily part of their Life List because their "first" birds are usually common ones seen around the house. They may do it just to keep track.

Usually, I am not one of them. Weather is one reason. Two New Years ago, the weather was frigid and I was content to be home. Last year, rain soaked the area on New Year's Eve and I had no inclination to trudge through mud.

But this year, with my time limited by working away from home, I felt restless so, after seeing the cardinal, I ventured into the cold wind of January and met one of my friends who was at nearby Speedwell Lake in Morristown with his photo club.

We walked the path to the wider part of the lake. Few birds on the water, even fewer in the trees. But there was a pair of bufflehead ducks and, in an inlet, a few Canada geese.

I decided to go to another place near me to see how many "first" birds I could find. The answer: not many.

Cold, desolate and not the best place to find birds on a windy day. Jan. 1, 2020.
(Margo D. Beller)

That's how it goes some days, but I was in a truly bad place to try to find birds on a cold, windy day. I was in a county park that was once the Greystone psychiatric hospital. It is a wide-open piece of property with little to block a strong wind. Worse, the county has been cutting down ash trees to limit the damage caused by the emerald ash borer. Just like a year ago, the fallen trees have been left on the ground, pulled away from what is normally a cross-country running track. But cross-country is over for the season and the big machinery that pushed the cut trees aside churned up the path to make it nearly unwalkable for the rest of us. (That did not stop the many people there walking their dogs, however.)

A few birds could be found, mainly sparrows and woodpeckers, but the more unusual birds I've seen here before when the sheltering grasses and weeds were taller and there were many more trees were long gone. I was glad to get back to my warm car and get to my warmer home.

For the record, these are my "first" birds of 2020:

Cardinal

Bufflehead ducks

Canada geese

Song sparrow

American crow

Redbellied woodpecker

White-throated sparrow

Downy woodpecker

Turkey vultures

Rock doves (pigeons)

It can only go up from here.

Summing Up My Life List

With the new year fast approaching, I was thinking about all the unusual birds I was able to see this year.

Life list (Margo D. Beller)

Every serious birder keeps a "life list" of birds seen, from the humble to the rare. As life lists go, mine is rather small - 352 - for someone who has sought out birds for more than a decade. Much of my list includes the birds we see every day but this year I was able to see a record (for me) high of four "new" birds because I had the time to do it. I was irregularly employed this year, and when I did work it was from home. So it was easy to make the time (tho' not always so easy to get MH to join me).

It seems every year a number of birds not found in my part of the world show up, either blown off course by strong winds or a bad sense of direction.

My life list is a photocopy of the list at the end of the 1947 edition of Roger Tory Peterson's guide to finding eastern birds. This is still considered by many to be the best birding guide ever published because it introduced Peterson's system of identifying field marks. But in 1947 many birds had different names and since then new birds were "created" when the birding bigwigs decided to split what had been one species into two or more (or vice versa). On my list I've also added many western birds I've seen in my travels. Several of my "new birds" this year are ones I realized I had not added when I first saw them: The Wilson's storm petrel and the pomarine jaeger seen from a whalewatch boat out of Gloucester, Mass., were numbers 350 and 351. My list has become so marked up and confusing (my photo is of the front page, not the marked-up back page) I've had to transfer the information to a bound volume MH bought me for that purpose, which is how I discovered the omissions.

I can go many years between finding "life birds." For instance, I saw No. 344, a Connecticut warbler, in October 2013, and No. 345, a roseate spoonbill, in May 2018. It was not for lack of trying. Many times we've gone to where a rarity was reported only to be disappointed, such as the boreal chickadee we were told we had just missed at the feeders of the Merrill Creek reservoir in March.

It was in December 2018 my employment became irregular, and that is how I was able to leave home and find these birds originally found by others:

No. 346 was a female Barrow's goldeneye, a western duck discovered at Merrill Creek. We traveled there on a very cold day in March 2019 for the duck and the boreal chickadee. The duck turned out to be easier thanks to the sun spotlighting the duck's round, brown head and yellow bill, and the arrival of Henry Kielblock, the founder of the Scott's Mountain hawkwatch located at that very parking lot. He had driven up to see the duck, pointed it out to us and then realized who we were (we visit this hawkwatch at least once a year in the fall). After he drove off, a pair of redhead ducks flew in, an unexpected bonus.

"Black-Headed Grosbeak" by jamesbadger is licensed under CC BY 2.0

No. 347 was a black-headed grosbeak, another western bird, reported at a feeder not too far from my home. Many had already seen and photographed it by the time I drove over in April. I learned that when you "stake out" a bird, bring a chair. I had not, but a kind man who had driven up with his wife from central Jersey gave me his seat as we waited from the top of the homeowner's driveway. We were soon joined by others. It was 45 minutes before I looked up and saw the bird's black head and orange breast (the file photo above is of a female, notable for the wide white "eyebrow"). It never came down to the feeder and I had a bad case of "warbler neck" but after watching it for 10 minutes I left satisfied.

No. 348 was a Henslow's sparrow that came from the midwest to the sprawling grassland preserve known as Negri-Nepote. Grasslands are in decline as they are built upon for housing developments, office parks and warehouses. Many had seen the Henslow's sitting in a particular shrub singing away, but when we walked out to the area on a very hot July 6 we almost missed it - it was hunkered down atop a different shrub nearby and not singing as it tried to stay out of the way of several redwinged blackbirds. But I saw the identifying field mark - a dark spot near the eye - and that would have to do.

No. 349 was an upland sandpiper, another bird in decline because of decreasing grasslands. On Aug. 24 we followed the directions given in the various bird reports and parked at the Burlington County (NJ) fairgrounds. There were already several people there, one with a spotting scope. I scanned the area with binoculars but only found a large number of killdeers. The man motioned us over and showed us the upland sandpiper. He then pointed out a couple of sanderlings (usually found on beaches), a pectoral sandpiper and a golden plover. We've often found birds thanks to the kindness of strangers.

The last of the new birds, No. 352, was a Nelson's sparrow on Oct. 12. The Nelson's is one of those birds created when the birding bigwigs decided to split the sharp-tailed sparrow into two types, the Nelson's and the saltmarsh. Both look very much alike. I had seen saltmarsh sparrows in a marsh in southern Maine years ago but was never completely sure if that's what they were. That changed when I found the Nelson quite by accident as I trailed MH hurrying (for him) back to our car as we were completing the Liberty Loop trail near the Wallkill River at the NJ-NY border. When I am seeking birds I walk far slower than MH with his gimpy knees, and as I was approaching the last curve something flew up and looked at me from the top of a shrub. It had a lot of yellow-orange in its face and neck, so I knew this was an unusual bird. I looked in my books and realized I had finally seen a Nelson's, which can be found at freshwater marshes.

There are birds I seek out every year but this year I found a number of birds I haven't seen in years - blue grosbeak, Tennessee warbler, least flycatcher - on trips I took alone to places relatively close by. That was when I would be restless because of my underemployment and needed to get out to give my days a sense of purpose.

But now I have a new job that takes me away from home, and my birding time is again limited to weekends. I'll have to make the most of the time I have.

Frozen but Surviving

December 2019 (Margo D. Beller)

I have never seen either "Frozen" movie but this week I got an inkling of what it is like to live in a frozen world.

In the past week we've had freezing rain that coated tree limbs, power lines, blades of grass and shrubs; followed two days later by an intense snow squall that threw about an inch of white on everything, including the roads; then came the intense cold. Only now, on this first full day of winter, is there any expectation of above-freezing warmth to melt the ice and allow my bowed-down yew hedge to rise and me to add matter to my compost pile.

In the meantime, as I watch the thermometer, the sun is shining prettily on the iced limbs of the trees and shrubs I can see from my porch.

Bowed boughs (Margo D. Beller)

It has been a hard week, particularly because I have started a new job and, for the first time in years, I must commute into New York. The sun rises later but I must rise earlier, and I must dress in layers to be ready for the harsh cold in my town and the (somewhat) warmer temperature when I arrive in the concrete jungle. Today, on the porch, I can see the sun is lower and its arc much shorter from when I could last spend time out here.

Feeders are out, but aside from some titmice and a cardinal in one of the bushes, there's been very little activity.  But I know that will change because when the feeders have come in at night this week they have been nearly empty.

In midtown Manhattan, it's another story. If I have the time to walk through some of the smaller parks near my office, it is easy to find what I call the "usual three" types of birds - house sparrows, pigeons and starlings. These birds will eat anything, including bread tossed by people. To survive they have adapted to life and people in the city.

Frozen feeder baffle (Margo D. Beller)

So, too, have white-throated sparrows, which I'm now finding so often in my city travels I may have to start referring to the "usual four." While these sparrows don't go for tossed bread, they manage to survive by scratching the soil for insects or gleaning what they can find (insects or fruit) from foliage. At night, they roost where they can - the other day I heard something as I walked along Madison Ave., and found a white-throat atop an office tower display of Christmas trees surrounded by concrete!

White-throats are winter visitors - they are common in my yard at this time of year - but catbirds are not. On the coldest day of this past week, when the wind chill in New York City was in the single digits, I found one catbird sitting at the base of a shrub in the sun. Catbirds have been gone from my yard for months (usually the white-throats replace the catbirds) and yet the previous week, before the frozen rain and cold, I had found a total of five catbirds in two Manhattan parks.

Sun on ice (Margo D. Beller)

I was astounded. They were not perturbed by my closeness at all. One, in fact, sat on a railing and looked at me. Then the cold came. Obviously, these birds either fly to another, more hospitable habitat, work harder to find food in this park or die. On this day at least one catbird has managed to survive. But it is a tough world out there and a small bird faces large odds, so who knows what happened to the catbirds and other birds I've seen over the last two weeks that should've been elsewhere (including a brown thrasher, swamp sparrow and ovenbird).

No doubt the annual Christmas Bird Count, where people comb the streets and parks all over the U.S., if not the world, to see what birds are around at this time of year, will find all sorts of birds in the urban parks. I know there is an annual count in New York's Central Park, that oasis of green that attracts dozens of types of birds during the spring and fall migration periods and likely many staying for the winter. But for me, finding a bird in a small patch of green in an area surrounded by traffic, noise and people is more than just a bit of wonder, it is a small miracle. Like that catbird basking in the cold sun.

I've been thinking of it a lot as I make my way along in this frozen, hard world.

Frozen world (Margo D. Beller)

Winter Spirits

There are many depressing things about winter, but one of the worst is when it comes weeks early.

Shriveled viburnum leaves, Nov. 17, 2019 (Margo D. Beller)

I'm no great lover of winter, especially when it brings cold that forces me to turn on the furnace, dry air that chaps my skin, and kills off the few days of comfortable autumn weather when the foliage seems to be at its peak.

Meteorologically, winter is Dec. 21, considered the shortest day of the year in terms of daylight. Nowadays in the U.S., we turn the clocks back to standard time in early November. In the space of a day the sun sets at 5 p.m. and then increasingly earlier, bringing darkness at a time when I am trying to finish my work before making supper. I bring in the bird feeders in the dark nowadays and soon I'll be rising in the dark again, too.

We had a major cold snap in mid-November that killed or damaged any plant that was not taken inside or covered. So foliage on several of my shrubs and those I see during my hikes along the Whippany River is shriveled and brown, not given a chance to change color. And then there is my lawn, which seems to get covered with leaves about a day after MH and I take a rake or blower to it. (The large white oak leaves are the last to come down in the backyard, while the neighbor's walnut tree takes its own sweet time dropping leaves that are blown over my front yard.)

Oak leaves hanging on (Margo D. Beller)

And don't get me started on the pods still hanging in the black locust tree.

Raking is a pain, literally, and so is shoveling snow, another hazard of winter.

No, I don't like cold or the increase in darkness. I spend a lot of time in the early morning on my enclosed back porch, watching for birds and waiting for the sun to rise above the neighbor's house and hit me square in the face, the ultimate in sun lamps for those of us seasonally disordered folk.

But since my complaining about it won't change anything, at least until continued global warming brings more hot days or a lake at my front door from extreme weather, I might as well look at the good things winter brings.

With the shrub foliage down along the hiking path I can see usually hidden streams. Sometimes there are ducks - mallards but also wood ducks and hooded mergansers.  If I am lucky, there's a great blue heron. When tree leaves are down it is easier to see hawks flying overhead.

Shriveled forsythia (Margo D. Beller)

The colorful warblers and other passerines are gone but other birds are arriving from the north because they consider New Jersey warm enough to survive winter. White-throated sparrows are plentiful, as are juncos, the American tree sparrows and fox sparrows, all winter visitors. There may be the occasional surprise, such as a goldfinch hanging around my feeder or a reported rough-legged hawk over a field. In some years, birds of the far north must come farther south to find food because of the lack of seed crops or, in the case of some owls or hawks, animal prey.

And, of course, there are the local birds that don't leave so they will be coming to my feeders because they can't find enough weed or other seeds and the harsh cold has killed off the insects. I'm already seeing more titmice, chickadees, cardinals and various woodpeckers.

Another advantage: The garden work is just about over for the year and I can concentrate on important things, like taking a long walk in the bracing cold and looking for birds foraging to survive.

In the end it will still be cold and winter will still come, whatever the calendar says, and whether I am ready for it or not.

Keeping the Cats Out

I like cats. This is important for me to say because of what I will be writing.

I like cats, just not in my backyard.

We all know people can get very attached to their pets, which is why I have to wonder why some of my neighbors here in suburbia persist in putting their cats outside where they can stalk and possibly kill the birds visiting my feeders.

Outdoor cats (RE Berg-Andersson)

Mind you, I have no objections to cats taking out those blasted digging chipmunks. I have seen a cat in the neighbor's yard chowing down on one. When done an American crow, like the turkey vulture a member of Nature's cleanup crew, took the remains away.

But cats and bird feeders don't mix.

The other day was the third time in two weeks I had to chase a cat away from my yard. Each time it was a different cat and not the first time they've visited. One short-haired tabby looked mean and pregnant. One long-haired, black-eyed cat was mangy. The third, a black short-hair with green eyes, wore a collar. When I chase this one off it always runs across my street toward the homes that abut the community garden.

These cat visits seem to come in cycles, but there is no denying that as the weather chills I am putting out more feeders and these are drawing more birds and those - both four-legged and winged - that can kill them.

When I mentioned these cat visits on a birding Facebook page the comments - mostly anti-cat - rained down. The one woman who wondered how we can consider ourselves animal lovers because we are pro-bird and anti-cat was forced to delete her comment, unfortunately. Cats have been venerated for millennia. There are cat-lover societies in the U.S. and abroad. There is even a group I recently found of people who paint nothing but cats. I have always found it sadly ironic that in one of the best birding areas in the U.S., if not the world - Cape May, NJ - there is a large feral cat community that is rigorously protected even as other residents fear the effect on the many migratory birds that pass through, particularly in spring and fall.

Some friends have cats and I like to watch them walk around the room. All these cats are rigorously kept indoors. They move the same way as their bigger cousins the lions, tigers and jaguars. Their personalities are as different as people. Some are skittish, some disdainful, some friendly and almost dog-like. One brother-in-law once had a cat that came when called. She would bring "gifts" of dead mice to the front step, sometimes into the house.

This may be one reason why people put out cats: It may go back to our rural past when cats were let out to kill mice and other vermin hiding and eating in our barns. Have you ever wondered why many old bookstores have cats? (I know, I'm dating myself here.) Besides entertaining customers (guilty) they kill the mice that could destroy inventory.

Cat on car (RE Berg-Andersson)

Another brother-in-law would always say, "If I have an animal it has to work." So the cats would be let out (luckily, they ignored the feeder birds) until he lost so many of them to predators or automobiles he finally started keeping his cats inside.

Many towns hire animal control companies that will come, lure and trap the cat and take it to a place where it can be adopted or put down if it doesn't have a tag identifying an owner. Too many unspayed loose cats, like the mean short-hair in my yard, could have too many kittens and before you know it you have a real mess.

Perhaps the owner of the black cat had it spayed or neutered. That doesn't make it right to let it go outside on a cold day to show up in my yard and take an interest in a visiting cardinal. This isn't a rural area. Maybe cats are smarter than the dead dogs, deer and other animals I've seen on the roadside, but maybe not, particularly at night.

I can only stay vigilant while hoping any cat I chase off isn't hit by a speeding car. As I said, I like cats.