Fish Like a GIRL

“Hey! Why can’t you just be nice?” 

It’s usually a comment more than a question, and I cannot be the only bird watcher who has ever posed it to a “bully” bird outside the window. Resources at my feeders are never what I would call scarce, but there is still competition among the birds who visit. The neighborhood hawk has been around again, so at least there are not squirrels or chipmunks also involved in the competition. The hawk seems to have taken care of all but one or two squirrels, who stay fairly well out of view, and the rabbits, which have become nocturnal in the presence of the hawk.

I’m sure many of us have spent countless hours in the winter curled up on the couch watching the action at the feeder. It is a good way to pass the time on a lazy day. We notice the differences from day to day and it is fun to see who might stop by.

For me, my feeder activity in the front of the house has dropped due to some changes in shrubbery, namely taking out an arbor vitae that was completely overgrown and replanting plants that do not yet provide the same amount of cover, but there are still birds challenging each other there and, to a greater extent, the feeder in the back yard. Some coexist pretty well, but others seem to scrap and fight no matter how prevalent the food is.

At my house, the two main feeder visitors are the American tree sparrow and the house sparrow. I did notice about 28 (my best count) European starlings in the neighbors large tree in their backyard, but luckily they no longer come to eat an entire block of suet every other day anymore. That said, there are others around, more so in the summer, obviously, but I have seen a few chickadees and other “LBBs,” as my Mom used to call them. That was her name for any Little Brown Bird she could not readily identify as it flew by. 

As more of my newly planted vegetation grows, I know the abundance and diversity of species will increase, likely increasing the arguments at the various feeders. It is a bit of an experiment in the works right now.

I recently read an article about just this very thing — what is all the fighting about at the bird feeders and who usually wins those fights. I found it on the Cornell Lab All About Birds website. We tend to anthropomorphize animals, that is, give them human traits, because we view those we see often as our “little friends,” but often their behavior is something totally different, as I learned in the Lab’s Understanding Bird Behavior class.

In 2017, a team lead by Cornell Lab of Ornithology Research Associate Eliot Miller used Project FeederWatch data to analyze those tussles where one bird robs a spot at the feeder from another. Their results were published in the journal Behavioral Ecology. The results revealed somewhat of a hierarchy when it comes to birds we are likely to see in our backyards. It started to answer the question of which birds would “beat feet” (or wings, in this case) and which would “take a seat,” or fight for their place at the human-provided food source. 

This study was taken a step further by a Canadian researcher from Carleton University, biologist Roslyn Dakin. This research, conducted with student Ilias Berberi, looked at social tendencies of certain birds and if that played a role in the hierarchy at feeders. Finches and sparrows, as most know, tend to be more social, packing as many “friends” into a feeder as possible. Larger birds, such as woodpeckers and nuthatches, tend to be more solitary. It would make sense, even from a layman’s perspective, as smaller birds would have more of an ability to share a food source effectively, where larger birds would prefer to have what meager meals they can scrape together all to themselves, especially in difficult winter conditions. The article I mentioned, by Marc Devokaitis, said the team analyzed 6.1 million FeederWatch observations and determined, for 68 different species, the average group size for each species. Those numbers were staggering to me, and it made me feel good to be part of a project that huge. I know FeederWatch is responsible for a great deal of data, but 16 million observations was a pretty cool number.

“What we realized once we got into [the FeederWatch data] is that it actually presents all kinds of opportunities that we don’t have otherwise,” said Dakin, quoted in the article by Devokaitis. “It lets us ask questions that we couldn’t possibly ask through the observations of any one scientist or even a small team of scientists because no one person could observe communities across an entire continent.”

The researchers also looked at one-on-one dominance interactions that had been put into FeederWatch: 55,000 of them, to be exact. The question to be answered was whether it was the loner birds or those who found strength in numbers that ultimately left the feeder more quickly. In other words, who “beat feet” and who “took a seat,” as I like to say. Apparently, strength in numbers did not equate to the bird community at the feeders. Larger, loner birds were more apt to chase away the smaller birds. A woodpecker, for instance, would chase away a gathering of American house sparrows. House sparrows and American goldfinches were the most likely to leave the feeder when faced with a foe looking to usurp their place.

Interestingly, though, social birds did have some advantages when staying true to their social ways. Pine Siskins, who lose most of their interactions when alone, the study found, fared much better when staying in groups. In fact, when a group of at least five birds visited a feeder, they were, on average, twice as successful.

One thing I found interesting was the success rate of “loner” birds who visited feeders together. The researchers found birds such as Northern cardinals, who are seen normally as a “lone wolf” species, actually became less successful in showdowns at feeders when they arrived in groups than when they showed up alone.

“We think that these effects might be driven by what the birds are paying attention to,” said Dakin. “So maybe when cardinals are there in a group, they’re paying attention to each other and might be more prone to being displaced by a different species.”

The article also mentioned another study, published this year in the journal Nature Communications. That study found that birds who are often found together are more amicable at feeders together than others. For instance, it found that chickadees, goldfinches and juncos do not tend to fight at feeders. However, if yellow-rumped warblers invade the feeder territory of chickadees, they will throw down! 

Yes, I anthropomorphized chickadees right there. I do not think we, as humans, can avoid it, honestly. Gavin Leighton, the researcher who headed the study, attributed that to not expending energy in unproductive ways. 

Much like the parents of toddlers learn to “pick their battles,” such is the case in the bird community. If one species winds up at a feeder with another species with which they frequently interact, they tend to just go about their business. But if a bully shows up, they know it is just better to fly off to live another day. Another article that may be of interest to those who enjoyed this column is “When 136 Bird Species Show Up At a Feeder, Which One Wins,” by Alison Haigh. It can also be found on the Cornell Website allaboutbirds.org.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].