Last night, being the 5th of November, there was considerable firework activity, bangs, whizzes etc. I know that some household pets become a little distraught with all the noise of fireworks- but what about the urban birds? I imagine that some of them are happily roosting in a tree only to be suddenly disturbed by a rocket, possibly whizzing very near to them. Does anybody know if the birds are disturbed by the fireworks or are they very sound sleepers?
This morning I was quite surprised to see a Magpie in an elderberry bush pecking at the bark on one of the branches. It stripped about six inches of bark away to leave bare wood. The bits of bark were dropped to the ground so I think it must have been feeding on insects under the bark. I wonder if Lapwing or Applepud have seen such behaviour?
I've never seen that behaviour with magpies although i do have a few that visit the garden. But every spring I used to prune the elderberry down to the ground because I thought it might be damaging the shed. Anyhow the shed roof collapsed this summer (nothing to do with the elderberry- just general age) and so the shed was pulled down. I now have a blank space in the garden and a stub of an elderberry - So a big decision this spring. What do I do if the elderberry starts sprouting branches ? Let it grow and see if the hungry magpie flies my way.
I suppose the magpie was very hungry with all the frost, snow and low temperatures we have been having and elderberry bark is very easy to strip off. As a child I can remember stripping off the bark from elderberry prunings -no electronic gizmos for me! But I don't remember seing any insects under the bark. I imagine the magpie had found a branch with a bit of damaged bark that insects had crawled under to protect themselves from the winter weather.
I made a 'bug hotel' last winter and repeated it this autumn. I got the idea from some programme on television. The idea is to give insects some where to live in the winter that is warmer and drier than ambient conditions. It just consists of a tube of wire netting filled with dry leaves and raised from the ground by a couple of inches and a roof to keep out the rain. The roof is a polythene dome that was originally meant to protect young plants in springtime. In springtime you can check which insects are using your hotel by emptying all the leaves onto a white sheet and having a look at the residents. I didn't do this because i suspected that my robins would quickly devour the lot!
Hi Applepud - I have just come across a comment that Magpies have a strong beak with a sharp cutting edge which can be used for cutting flesh. Perhaps the bird that "Goldcrest" saw was testing or even sharpening the cutting edge.
Two bird watching friends very kindly gave me for Christmas a plate decorated with cedar waxwings eating purple berries on a dark green spikey bush. Cedar waxwings are North American birds and the bush was a juniper.
Several years ago I went to a number of state and national parks in Utah, USA, one of which was Cedar Breaks. Cedar Breaks rest on top of the Colorado plateau at an elevation of 10,000 feet. It is a huge amphitheatre of differing hues of sandstone strata and worn pinnacles. It spans some 3 miles and drops 2,000 feet. In places the sandstone supports a few juniper bushes.
At that time I was told that the name Cedar Breaks is derived from the early European settlers, who used the term breaks to indicate badlands – those lands unsuitable for crops and rearing animals. The term cedar refers to the juniper bushes, which the early settlers thought incorrectly were cedar trees.
From the above, would it be right to assume that the cedar waxwing was similarly misnamed and should have been called the juniper waxwing. Does any body know if this is a correct assumption?
PS Cedar Breaks is worth a visit
My brother in law was telling me that every year the local wild mallards come to the garden and their neighbours to forage in the garden pool. Apart from the pool foraging (the pool is very small- about 10 foot square and very near the house), these mallards also peck about on the lawn. He has seen them pick up little snails with their bills and then a few moments later spit them out. He claims that the snail shells that are ejected from the mallards bills are completely empty and he thinks that the mallards must somehow suck out the snail from its shell. Is this possible and does anyone out there know??
Do Mallards eat snails - although I suppose that most Ducks are grazers living on water plants Wikipedia tells me that Mallards eat insects, worms, slugs, snails, frogs, corn, wheat, barley and grass. I imagine they must suck them out because I don't think they have a beak strong enough to crush the shell.
Cedar Waxwing has a scientific name of Bombycilla cedorum. The "cedorum" comes from the Latin "Cedrus" which means cedar OR juniper. So it could have been a 50:50 choice even though juniper and cedar are actually different trees - the Red Cedar tree is actually a juniper!
Tom - your post and now your reply to Judy are just what I envisaged we might do in Forum. People ask questions in Forum and, rather than going to ornithologists for the answers, we wait to see if answers might come from our membership. This gets a dialogue going which people hopefully find interesting. Answers, if forthcoming, demonstrate the knowledge which our own people have and are (I think) much more memorable when achieved in this way.
Your reply demonstrated the usefulness (of some) scientific names. I looked at Wikipedia to see what they said which was - "fondness for small cones of the Eastern Redcedar, which is said to be a kind of Juniper, gave the bird its common name".
Your involvement (thankyou) enabled me to test our Private Messaging service which is available to members of this website. You should get a message from Gruffalump - it may be an E-mail - if not please go to My Account and click on Private Messages - I think it will probably be there. Thanks again, Bob.
Thanks for the two very useful replies to my query. Do the cedar waxwings spend the summer in Canada or the arctic regions and then travel south in autumn? And how far south do they travel?
I have seen Cedar Waxwings on migration twice in the States. In October at Cape May - Delaware - on the eastern seaboard, birds congregate here before flying south over the Delaware Bay. They were flying over quite high like squadrons of fighter planes and one group of about 40 settled on a nearby tree. The views were fantastic of adults with plenty of juveniles present. In southern Texas in April the birds were flying up from Mexico.
Previous posts and replies on this topic have been deleted following publication of the topic in Features. Bob.
Judith put a piece in the March Newsletter about watching a child feeding Ducks on a pond. She noticed that Mallards being Dabblers took the floating food whereas the Tufted Ducks being Divers went for the food floating to the bottom. She finished by saying "but why haven't I noticed this before?
A few minutes ago I was idly watching a couple of male Robins on the garden fence and this brought to mind an earlier posting (again by Judith - you may remember it) about aggression between Robins. I realised that I was watching to see if the same thing happened. They both flew down into the bottom of the hedge. Then one flew up into a low tree, seeking a dominant position I thought. Then a cat emerged and they both flew away. No fight this time!
The message of course is that the more aware you are of bird behaviour the more closely you will observe them - which can't be bad if you are interested in why the birds do what they do. Thanks Judith for making me more aware.
During a visit to Leighton Moss on 1st November we paid a brief visit to the Eric Morcambe hide. I was interested to see a Redshank and Greenshank just a few metres apart feeding together. Today after a bit of searching on the internet I found a study by Edington and Morgan, University College, Cardiff in 1973 which showed the following feeding patterns:-
Redshank 62% water and submerged mud, exposed mud surface 23%, exposed mud 0-3 cm 15%.
Greenshank 33% water and submerged mud, exposed mud surface 17%, exposed mud 0-3 cm 28%, exposed mud 3-6 cm 22%.
It's good to see how they manage to live and feed together - Greenshanks clearly probe deeper than Redshanks. Bob.