Well, notwithstanding my exaggerated claim, I have no intention of ongoing use of bird songs and am familiar with the move away from them as a practice to “enhance” your lifelists and such. This one little feller is really something, tho and I played it just to see what it would do (I found the Cornell audio files while id-ing the bird). I have heard of those who actually transmit bird calls on outdoor speakers to attract them. I’m not in that club at all and wouldn’t ever be. But thanks for reminder!
Funny, even while typing this, he is right outside singing away and just hit the window. He seems very confused and everyone wonders when he will take the time to eat and such. Since he hits every car mirror and grill in the parking lot, doing my part by putting a cutout in my window won’t change things to any extent. I think he must have a migraine.
If it’s only happening in early nesting season, then the bird is likely having a territorial stand-off with his own reflection, in the belief that this is a rival male trying to steal his, um, chick.
Thanks. We’re all wondering similar things. The Cornell site says they nest in bushes and there are plenty about. It most definitely seems territorial. He’s probably hit the window 60 times today and then he flies over to a car mirror and hits that. We actually put a framed photo of a red-shouldered hawk in the window and I put a stuffed toy cardinal (yeh, that was for fun) on the windowsill. I played red-shouldered, red-tailed hawks and even a Gr. Hrnd Owl calsl over the computer.
But speaking of mating behavior, it’s yet January, but the geese are already starting mating behavior, which is weird enough. We have a huge permanent population of Canada Geese and their lookalike smaller kin, Cackling. If you ever wanted to study geese behavior, this would be the place.
When I was a kid, the dining room wall most mostly glass, and for a time we had a birdfeeder hanging from an overhanging trellis/sunshade about three feet in front of the glass. For a couple of years, we had regular male cowbird who’d perch facing the glass and squawk and display (hunched down, ‘shoulder’ of wings raised. Less often it’d be a redwing blackbird. When a redwing displays, the red shoulder flashes are at their maximum extent. The more red one has, the more dominant the bird is. Ornithologists have captured dominant males and dyed the flashes black. When they so, that bird loses all its status. They usually won’t be able to stake out a territory, find a mate and breed until its next moult, when the flash will be restored. Cruelty, thy name is science.
Should have seen all the thousands of snow geese I dyed dayglow yellow back in the seventies, the Russians were using pink at the same time, it was quite the party. The Russian birds would lose their dye jobs after a matter of weeks but I used petric acid which was permanant until molt, it was very noticable back on the colonial breeding grounds up north.
It must have been like the Vietnam era. For the ganders of a more, um, conservative inclination, it was a frustrating time. The only available bachelor geese were either pinkos, or they were geese with a yellow streak running down their backs. What’s a girl to do?
Since we’re on the topic of birding, etc., I corresponded with the fella below on our local Audobon site for Bay Area birders. His photos are stunning and he’s another local. [I never get tired of lookin’ at birds and bird pix]
I had a woodcock rummaging through the soil in my garden the other day when the BIG FROST was on:
A friend said that lots of woodcocks are dying right now, since they need soft soil to feed, and lots have come over from the continent.
Searching the web about woodcocks and Scotland there were pages and pages about shooting them. Luckily there is now a temporary shooting ban in force for a number of wild birds, because of the severe weather. Included are woodcocks, ducks and geese. There is usually a lot of geese shooting going on here at the Findhorn Bay, many mornings at sunrise I could hear the guns. We got tens of thousands of geese overwintering, and normally they are not protected (the population is actually growing, thanks to the winter barley fields in Moray [thanks to the whiskey industry]).
Hans talks about shooting woodcock, in the previous post. Some of my old bird books, the ones I grew up on, that were my father’s, talk happily about eating them, and many other bird species, even telling you how best to cook a swan, which waders taste particularly fishy, etc! I am glad that times have changed!
Not in Scotland they haven’t!
I should have written “temporary shooting ban”.
Now corrected.
Bird and game shooting is big business here, a big sport industry.
In the states there are only two species of shorebirds that are legal to hunt, snipe and woodcock. This area where we live now, southeastern Chesapeake Bay, was famous for it’s waterfowl hunting both legal and illegal. Back in the '70s I was involved in a bust on some swan hunters in North Carolina. Swan hunting was illegal at that time but all of these guys were older men who had grown up in families that had hunted swan legally decades before. Swans were a classic holiday dinner entree. The winter of that bust I had to come east again when there was a avian cholera, Pasteurella multocida, outbreak. I can’t even begin to say how many thousands of birds died including a hefty percentage of the tundra swan population here at the time. We had to used the municipal incinerators up to a 100 miles away to handle all the bodies. The hunting has been moving further north as fewer waterfowl come this far south due to warmer temperatures. Even so a few years ago we had over a million scoters on the bay around the islands of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, hard to describe, or count too for that matter.
I’m happy to report that, notwithstanding the occasional oil spill, our shorebirds have really come back in the Bay Area from the dark days of DDT and gross pollution. On any day, you can go down to the Berkeley Marina and watch the pelicans (who were especially threatened) hunt as well as many other species.
As for the hunting ethos, I hate to see it abandoned completely even if it makes people feel warm and fuzzy. We have a non-native wild turkey population that is incredible and growing all the time. They are actually shooting them with silencers here where I work using a PREDATION permit (usually done on coyotes and lions who are killing sheep). What is the great advantage of having a person in a Fish & Game uniform shoot and dump, rather than a controlled hunt that results in feeding families? I think it’s a question that needs to be asked. I do acknowledge, however, that with our expanded human population, hunting in suburban areas has its risks.
I don’t know if Canada geese are even edible, but their populations are burgeoning too. I can’t figure out if its a return to what was before the Gold Rush or not. Many early accounts of this area mention “brant” and ducks in numbers that blackened the sky. I don’t know if the term brant in earlier years was species specific or applied to all geese and cranes (we have Sandhill Cranes in the Central Valley). I do know that many of our current large populations are not migratory, no doubt enabled by artificial reservoirs and golf course lawns. I can look out my window and see at least 100 Canada and Cackling Geese on the golf course, but there are easily 1,000 in this valley year-round. The management tries to find their nests and addle the eggs with oil or something to control them. Some of the areas of the course, near the water recycling lake, stink like the worst stockyard because of the geese crap. I keep wondering if predatory animals will step it up, or an avian virus will appear.
Yet the State of Maryland is in the process killing all of the mute swans in the Bay because the state claims they’re largely responsible for the the low population of things like crabs, oysters, and rockfish. The mute swans are technically an alien species; although they’ve been here for over 300 years, they were introduced from Europe by early colonists. I think the reasoning goes that the swans eat the grasses, which leads to dead zones and thus the reduced populations of commercially valuable fish and shellfish. Never mind that there are around 400 swans in the 4000-plus square miles of the Bay. And the runoff and over-fishing.
Depends on who’s talking. Me, I prefer domestic hands-down as wild goose and duck taste a lot like beef liver to me. If I were starving, yeah, I suppose I’d eat it.
There is likely some dispute about the when and how of the introduction of Mute Swans into NA. It is very probable that self-reproducing populations didn’t exist until the nineteen fifties. They are very hard on habitat and on indigenous wildlife. The USFWS and several states have very active Trumpeter Swan reintroduction programs in a effort to stop or slow Mute Swan expansion. The Trumpeter is one of those species we very nearly wiped off the face of the earth. They coexist well with most other species of waterfowl, except Mutes. Mutes won’t even share nesting habitats with other waterfowl and they have very large territories that they defend vigorously during nesting season. I find I feel much the same way about Mutes that I do about the “Wild Horses” at Assateague and Chincoteague, the damage they do to ecosystems isn’t something those systems can bear.
Me I use to like them both but the domestic birds are off my diet now. But both “resident” geese and migratory geese are edible it’s important not to overcook waterfowl to avoid the “liver” flavor. Most states have a “resident” goose hunting season but of course most of these birds are in non-hunt-able urban areas.
In my home town in Wisconsin the town fathers will not allow dogs in city parks because of the poop worry, yet there are several hundred geese all over the main park on Lake Winnebago. You take your life in your hand just trying to walk on the side walks without slipping in the droppings. Of course the dogs presence would put a stop to that.
We also have a few populations of feral turkey that are a major nuisance here in southeastern Virginia. They love to roost on warm cars in the cooler weather and their poop will peel the paint right off your vehicles, but they also are very tasty.
