Read the full article by clicking the link at the bottom.
I can understand this upsets some people. If your bird feeder is being frequented by a hawk every day and ruining the bird-feeding experience for both you and the little birds, the best thing to do is to take the feeder down for a week or so. When the hawk realizes the "watering hole" has dried up, it will move on to another area. As soon as you put the feeders back up, the smaller birds will return to the yard right away.
This is a fabulous article about the memories of birds. Click the link at the bottom to read the full article-it's well worth it.
If someone calls you a “bird brain,” they don’t mean to compliment you. It turns out, however, that birds you see every day can accomplish astonishing feats of memory.
What’s truly amazing isn’t the sheer number of seeds chickadees can store, but that they remember most of them! Black-capped Chickadees have been observed storing close to 1,000 seeds in one day. That means thousands of seeds each winter. They've been tested to remember these locations for at least a month if not longer.
Ontario SwiftWatch is a volunteer-based program where community groups and professional biologists work together to locate and describe nesting and roosting Chimney Swift habitat within Ontario's urban areas. These grass-roots groups find and track Chimney Swift nest and roost locations within their communities, count numbers of birds, and act as urban stewards for active habitat sites. Bird Studies Canada (BSC) helps facilitate this process by providing training, support, monitoring resources, and data management and analysis.
Nice article-click the link at the bottom to read more.
Outside our kitchen window we have a squirrel-proof bird feeder. It not only attracts birds, many species, but it brings in squirrels, chipmunks, even predators like hawks and cats.
We enjoy our wildlife menagerie because they are not only enjoyable to watch but they also remind us of certain personal responsibilities that cannot be delegated to the community or to the government — like having adequate food supplies on hand in case of natural emergencies. Incidentally, the squirrel-proof feeder drives the squirrel’s nuts — pun intended.
“Those are Black Capped Chickadees,” declared the man next to us. Yes, I thought, COSI is north of Interstate 70 but, if that chickadee flies a quarter of a mile south, across the highway, people at the Grange Audubon Center would identify that very same bird as a Carolina Chickadee! Why? Location, location, location, it’s all about location. Melanie Shuter had shared this chickadee I.D. tip with me just weeks earlier. Since then I have been learning all I can about the whimsical little chickadee.
Just about everybody with a bird feeder sees them sooner or later: those clumps of feathers strewn nearby like leftovers from an old-fashioned pillow fight.
The response is to cringe in recognition: A hawk must have nailed a small bird while it was trying to grab a meal on a cold winter's day.
The cringe is typically accompanied by a twinge: You are somehow complicit in this carnage. After all, you're the one who put out the feeder in the first place.
