I have had lots of inquiries this fall about the lack of birds at bird feeders.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think Hurricane Irene or other natural phenomena have caused bird populations to plummet.\u00a0 Rather, I think that our resident birds are finding enough food in nature during our mild and mostly snow-free fall so far.\u00a0 I have hopes that we will get a nice influx of Common Redpolls and Pine Siskins this winter throughout our state.<\/p>\n
An obvious difference in birds from breeding season to the winter is the increase in flocking behavior. During the breeding season, a pair of birds often occupies a nesting territory for the exclusive use of themselves and their young.\u00a0 This territorial behavior breaks down after the nesting season and flocking behavior is commonly observed in the fall, persisting until the following spring.<\/p>\n
What is the advantage of flocking?\u00a0 Ornithological research has indicated two major advantages of this social behavior.\u00a0 The first is an increase in foraging success, that is an increase in the success of finding food.\u00a0 Food abundance for many birds is typically much reduced in the winter in comparison to the bounty of summer.\u00a0 Furthermore, food in the winter tends to be patchy.\u00a0 The food, such as acorns or birch seeds, may be abundant in one small area but non-existent in nearby areas.<\/p>\n
In such cases where food is rare and patchy, flocking can be a real advantage to birds in locating the highly dispersed food.\u00a0 With many eyes searching for food, it is likely that a food bonanza will be located that might well be missed if only one or two birds were searching the same area.<\/p>\n
Even though the food will need to be shared among a number of birds, a modest meal is better than no meal.\u00a0 Sometimes, it pays to cooperate.<\/p>\n
The second advantage of flocking is an increase in the detection of predators.\u00a0 With many pairs of eyes searching for Sharp-shinned Hawks or Northern Shrikes, flocking land birds stand a better chance of seeing those predators.\u00a0 Watch the American Goldfinches, Black-capped Chickadees and other birds at your feeder.\u00a0 You can see each bird spends a good bit of time looking around, ever vigilant against predators.<\/p>\n
Both of these advantages of flocking may be realized for a flock.\u00a0 Actually, there may be an interaction between these two benefits.\u00a0 With lots of birds keeping a watch out for predators, each individual in a large flock devotes less time to searching for predators and more time in searching for food.\u00a0 An individual bird would have to spend much more time being vigilant and therefore have less time to forage.<\/p>\n
A flock, like many human families, is not free of conflict.\u00a0 Often times within a flock, one can observe a pecking order or hierarchy in the flock.\u00a0 One bird is dominant to all in the flock; the second bird in the pecking order dominates all but the top bird and so on down to the most subordinate bird that dominates no member of the flock.<\/p>\n
Birds rarely have to resort to fighting to claim their position in a pecking order.\u00a0 A dominant bird may simply make a threatening gesture and the subordinate bird will make a submissive gesture.\u00a0 As an example, the Jackdaw (a Eurasian member of the crow family) shows submission by bending its head low and turning the nape of its neck toward the dominant bird.<\/p>\n
Black-capped Chickadees provide a nice local example.\u00a0 In a winter flock, the dominant bird is the single adult male in the flock and its mate is the second-highest ranked individual.\u00a0 The remaining flock members are juvenile birds, none of which are the offspring of the adult pair.\u00a0 These juveniles interact with each other during the fall to establish a strict pecking order.<\/p>\n
[First published on December 11, 2011]<\/p>\n\n
I have had lots of inquiries this fall about the lack of birds at bird feeders.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think Hurricane Irene or other natural phenomena have caused bird populations to plummet.\u00a0 Rather, I think that our resident birds are finding enough food in nature during our mild and mostly snow-free fall so far.\u00a0 I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4625,420],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/mainebirds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}