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Safety Dance posted:It's probably not great to train crows to depend on you given that they're wild animals, but try tossing the peanut closer to you. You could also try reinforcing behaviors you want to see, like tossing the peanut only after the crow has come within some distance of you. It's my understanding that the threat of dependence is greatly overestimated and only really applies if you're providing so much food that normally-migratory birds decide to stay over winter instead of leaving, or are otherwise the sole source of food in the area. I've never tried to ration my local Australian magpies and I leave it up to them how much food they get by simply feeding them every time they turn up. I see them every morning for breakfast and on a good day that'll be it, with maybe a return for a quick bite to eat before roosting in the evening. I've seen them stop halfway through eating something I've given them in order to snap up a passing beetle, and then return to finish their meal.
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Jun 5, 2023 18:18
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GotLag posted:threat of dependence Hey look a bird thread! I think I told this story elsewhere: My wife has always been afraid / hated birds. She said her mom kept birds when she was little but that's all she'd say. Once when we were dating she called me to come to her apartment and get a bird out of her dryer vent. She left the building while I did that. We'd be out hiking and I'd point out an eagle and she'd just look the other way. 20 years later. My Dumb Dog kept finding peanuts in our backyard (just a DG yard, no soil). And then we had a bunch of sunflowers grow in an area we had nothing planted. The culprits were a pair of scrub jays. We had to look them up in a book to ID, and the big laugh was that "they're assertive" - no they're assholes. After a few months of watching them the braver one got very bold. She'd be having tea on the front porch and it would hang out on the table. Gets peanut. She named it Bird Bird. Every time wife goes outside she'd call for it. And if she's not outside sometimes it will be outside the window squawking and she'd drop whatever she's doing to go outside and peanut it. Someone is well-trained. Christmas time we had a wreath on the door, centered on the peephole. I hear someone knocking, look through the peephole and I am staring at Bird Bird. Peanut. When the Coopers Hawk comes around and perches in the backyard she runs it off. Last year Bird Bird and Mrs. Bird Bird had babies. At first I thought it was a drunk bird, then realized they were learning to fly. But now we've got like a dozen Scrub Jays and they ran off the OG pair. Wife is pissed that they built a nest in a backyard and defend it from everyone that used to visit.
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Jun 6, 2023 01:07
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GotLag posted:It's my understanding that the threat of dependence is greatly overestimated and only really applies if you're providing so much food that normally-migratory birds decide to stay over winter instead of leaving, or are otherwise the sole source of food in the area. Yeah I’ve just been tossing a little bit at a time. Another would show up and walk with me a block or two further. Then one day there was one who had poop on his back and the second one who flew down was “poop back” again. So I just decided to assume if it’s one at a time it’s the same one. I don’t feed them at my house because they quickly figured out where I live and a few times I’d get then pecking on my windows or yelling in my yard. It was cool one time I brought a hard boiled egg in the shell and this crow just flipped out. Like they steal eggs from other songbirds’ nests but here’s this huge frickin egg. He hopped around it excitedly and flew off and came back with a buddy and one found a stick and started tapping on it. I just stick to healthy stuff: unsalted nuts, kibble, bits of non fried chicken if I have some Some of the characters in question 
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Jun 6, 2023 01:20
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When I first started feeding the magpies at the park I'd take some nuts, cheese or parrot pellets (the magpies love crunching these). I noticed some magpies hanging around the lanes near my house and eventually managed to let them know I had food for them (which required finding a time and place where they were close enough to see me throwing food for them but enough distance for them to feel comfortable landing in the narrow alley while I was still present). Once I was able to make initial contact they'd watch for me, and when they saw me in my back yard they started turning up on my roof. At some point they happened to sing while on my roof and they noticed this made me come outside, and so they started singing every time they came over, and trained me to come out and feed them. After two years I think they're actually less dependent on me than when I started feeding them. When I started they had a super lovely territory with maybe one good foraging area in nature strips along part of one street. They were constantly under pressure and fighting to defend even that, every evening I'd watch them in aerial combat (swooping and beak clapping) with the neighbouring groups. By giving them a solid breakfast every morning I saved them the time needed to find it themselves, giving them the opportunity to push back. Now they own the entire foraging street and even a nice bit of lawn at a function centre that used to be very definitely owned by one of the competing groups. At the start they were barely hanging on and would visit me for 3+ meals a day, now they're happy and comfortable and only come around for breakfast, seemingly just out of habit. I don't have many pictures or videos because I only have two hands, my camera is not that great, my interactions with the magpies are frequent but often brief, and they are very wary of the camera up close. Here are Freckles (white spot above her left eye) and Pancake (still so young he had grey feathers on his back, and I thought he was a she), with a brief cameo from the third member of their group who disappeared (left? killed?) soon after. This was filmed August 2021. https://i.imgur.com/Ni6kmLS.mp4 Not long after I filmed this they started carrying food away instead of eating it at the table, and I was able to follow Freckles back to her nest. It was at this point I did some research and started making healthy food for them instead of giving them fatty junk:   At his next moult a few months later Pancake's back turned white and I realised he was male, which explained where the chicks came from. From everything I've been able to find out he did amazingly well to hold even a lovely territory like this one at such a young age. He's very friendly and sometimes likes to tell me all the songs he knows even when he doesn't want food (June 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwEewSwevZM GotLag fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 19:26
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One thing I don't understand about magpies is territory. If I drive to town I'll pass dozens of them in the undeveloped areas, doing bird things. But in 5 years I've never once seen one in the actual neighborhood. I wonder if the scrub jays (which opposite, I see them around people all the time but never out in the open lands) and robins drive them out, being similar size. Or maybe our local magpies just prefer scrub hunting/foraging/nesting than the trees in the neighbordhoods.
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Jun 6, 2023 19:59
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pumped up for school posted:One thing I don't understand about magpies is territory. If I drive to town I'll pass dozens of them in the undeveloped areas, doing bird things. But in 5 years I've never once seen one in the actual neighborhood. I wonder if the scrub jays (which opposite, I see them around people all the time but never out in the open lands) and robins drive them out, being similar size. Or maybe our local magpies just prefer scrub hunting/foraging/nesting than the trees in the neighbordhoods. To clarify, when I talk about magpies I am talking about Australian magpies, which are not corvids. What they are is territorial and sedentary (so you can always find the same individual birds in the same place), terrestrial (so you can see and approach them while they're on the ground) and intelligent (they remember and recognise people they [dis]like), all of which combine to make them almost embarrassingly easy to befriend if you put in any effort at all.
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Jun 6, 2023 20:20
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Gotcha. Very awesome bird friends you have there! The physical difference is pretty obvious, but your post did remind me that I've been confused about the magpies since I moved here (I'm in Northern Nevada). I'd never been around them before. Here's my old nemesis. For half the year he/she would divebomb me every time I went out to the yard/storage bins. Several years running. https://i.imgur.com/wTtrVQj.mp4 pumped up for school fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 22:23
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GotLag posted:To clarify, when I talk about magpies I am talking about Australian magpies, which are not corvids. There you go, I had no idea. Wikipedia tells me that while they are their own species they are closely related to the Black Butcherbird, and not at all to corvids. I've definitely been confidently wrong about that based on the assumption from the name.
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Jun 6, 2023 22:37
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H110Hawk posted:There you go, I had no idea. Wikipedia tells me that while they are their own species they are closely related to the Black Butcherbird, and not at all to corvids. I've definitely been confidently wrong about that based on the assumption from the name. This sort of naming weirdness is really common in Oz, almost as if boatloads of pasty Englishmen had no reference on the world other than their own family landholdings. As a result, we have fairy-wrens (not wrens), magpies (not magpies), and cuckoo-shrikes (not cuckoos or shrikes). I'm sure there are others... I'm a bird-interested American living here and it broke my brain for a while. I love my front-yard magpies though and they love me back by not swooping me during nesting season. Their friends down the road though... 
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Jun 7, 2023 02:26
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VacaGrande posted:I'm sure there are others... I'm a bird-interested American living here and it broke my brain for a while. American robins vs European robins
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Jun 7, 2023 02:38
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dupersaurus posted:American robins vs European robins I was just thinking Australian birds, but yeah this is a good one, and Australian robins are another good example of "that kinda looks similar, let's call it the same bird".
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Jun 7, 2023 02:44
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I would like to start feeding the local birds, but I'm really scared to attract them because of some local stays/ idiots who think cats should live on the street. Is there a way to make sure they're safe, aside from just putting the food where a cat can't reach? I want to create a bird buffet for birds to eat at, not a buffet of bird for local kitties!
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Jun 7, 2023 05:55
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There's also the white winged chough, which resides in Australia. Not a chough, or even a corvid.
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Jun 7, 2023 12:20
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DicktheCat posted:I would like to start feeding the local birds, but I'm really scared to attract them because of some local stays/ idiots who think cats should live on the street. so this is a pretty tough thing to have to resolve but i promise you that the fox urine spray you can buy online will keep cats away from your feeders this will ALSO repel squirrels and rabbits so if you were hoping to keep them happy and fed as well you may have to look into alternatives
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Jun 7, 2023 12:45
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We use spicy seed mix which helps keep the squirrels away. The most recent cats have died (struck by cars (boo) or eaten by coyotes (yay)) or their owners moved which has helped. gently caress em. People want cats they can live inside. Yesterday I saw a new cat coming so I need to keep an eye out. I should probably spray some fox urine around.
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Jun 7, 2023 17:02
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Master Twig posted:There's also the white winged chough, which resides in Australia. They are wonderful, hilarious birds though. They live in large extended family groups and are always snippy and bickering with each other. There are native corvids in Oz but very few species and they all look extremely similar, with all of them all black with white eyes as adults. Where I live we mostly have Australian Ravens and I've only been able to tell the others apart by their calls.
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Jun 8, 2023 01:46
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It is the season of baby birds which is awesome, what is not awesome is seeing dead baby birds almost everytime I go outside  Just yesterday I saw at least two dead common gull younglings, they make nests on the rooftops in the city so when the chicks start moving gravity, dogs, cars and crows will kill a large portion of them.
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Jun 9, 2023 08:28
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We have 4 American oystercatcher chicks on our little island right now. I don’t have good recent pics of them, they’re growing so fast and it’s hard to keep up 
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Jun 9, 2023 09:28
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Master Twig posted:There's also the white winged chough, which resides in Australia. And the white on the wings is only visible when they fly, which they don’t do much. Such a silly name. But- VacaGrande posted:They are wonderful, hilarious birds though. They live in large extended family groups and are always snippy and bickering with each other.
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Jun 12, 2023 00:35
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Blowjob Overtime posted:Hello fellow outer ring St. Paul semi-amateur birder. Late reply, but just found this because of Prag's post. We've always had a feeder up, but really got more into maintaining it during COVID WFH time. We mainly just have the one feeder with suet cage, but get a lot of variety being on the far outskirts of the cities with a couple acres in the woods. There are a couple of ponds on our street, so we get the random water fowl (as well as other water animals, but this is bird thread). Whoa, that hawk is awesome! It was Big Marine Park Reserve. I think I’ve even heard there’s somewhere you can rent kayaks on the lake, but can’t confirm that. I think there’s at least two loon families that live out there. Apart from that , there’s some nice walking trails and lots of cool birds around! The park reserve entrance is on the south end of the lake, think it’s like $7 for a day pass and maybe $20ish for a yearly pass that gets you into all the other Washington county parks. Also a super awesome playground if you have kids.
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Jun 12, 2023 13:54
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DoctaFun posted:Whoa, that hawk is awesome! Hawks are so tough to identify because they all look the drat same, but we listened to the calls on the Audubon app and figured out it was Red Shouldered. We hear it pretty regularly, so I guess it's doing well even though it left empty-handed that day. Also lol that I have a yearly Washington county park pass on my car that needs renewed this month because I work 5 minutes from a park right on the St. Croix where I go to eat lunch on every nice-ish day I can in the summer. We'll definitely check that place out sometime.
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Jun 13, 2023 00:38
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I know it's a bad cell phone picture, but that doesn't vibe with red shouldered to me unless it was a juvenile. (Which it may very well be depending on when the picture was taken, juveniles are always weird looking.) Adults are barred. Looks more cooper-y to me. You're in minnesota? https://birdfeederhub.com/hawks-in-minnesota/
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Jun 13, 2023 01:49
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How about Broad-winged? My local clown show looks like its going to pull off a nest. The baby(s?) was leaning way out of the nest. Photo from last week but I haven't had a chance to go back and check on them for a few days.  Acorn Woodpecker nest-6068 on Flickr Acorn Woodpecker nestling-6103 on Flickr
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Jun 13, 2023 05:55
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Those woodpeckers are coolH110Hawk posted:I know it's a bad cell phone picture, but that doesn't vibe with red shouldered to me unless it was a juvenile. (Which it may very well be depending on when the picture was taken, juveniles are always weird looking.) Adults are barred. Looks more cooper-y to me. You're in minnesota? Minnesota, yeah, southeastern Twin Cities. Google tells me it was April 29, 2021. I know we've heard red shouldered, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one is red shouldered. Here are a few more shots (all on a cell phone through a dirty window with a screen in it, unfortunately):   
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Jun 13, 2023 14:13
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ianae but flipping through Merlin that might be a juvenile red tail. It looks like red-shoulders are rare in your area, and that guy looks kinda big
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Jun 13, 2023 14:47
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Anyone have advice on how to "starling proof" a feeder? I have one in our side yard, and while the starlings are cool to look at, they literally empty my feeder and a whole suet in one day and scare off all of the other birds.
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Jun 13, 2023 21:28
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BaseballPCHiker posted:Anyone have advice on how to "starling proof" a feeder? If you mainly get chickadees and nuthatches I suppose you could rig up a chicken wire cage that would exclude slightly larger birds, with the downside that woodpeckers and jays might also be prevented. The better option might be just to let them finish off the suet and keep the feeder empty until the winter. This is the season of natural abundance so none of your birds are going to rely on it.
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Jun 13, 2023 21:55
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not my photo, but too cool to not share https://twitter.com/Napnyc1Napnyc/status/1670148272051159043?s=20
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Jun 18, 2023 01:26
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i don't really know anything about birds, but i saw some birdfeeders at the store and thought that might be kind of cool to have! do they always have to hang from something (vs. something that sits on the ground)? I have a decent sized patio that doesn't have much on it, so I thought it could be a nice addition.
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Jun 18, 2023 22:10
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actionjackson posted:i don't really know anything about birds, but i saw some birdfeeders at the store and thought that might be kind of cool to have! do they always have to hang from something (vs. something that sits on the ground)? I have a decent sized patio that doesn't have much on it, so I thought it could be a nice addition. You want it to hang otherwise rats will eat it.
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Jun 18, 2023 22:24
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H110Hawk posted:You want it to hang otherwise rats will eat it. well i meant something hanging, but the base is on the ground and connected by a pole or w/e i saw this really cool one that keeps squirrels out by having a bar, and the squirrel's weight drops the bar, closing the food holes!
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Jun 18, 2023 22:44
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actionjackson posted:
They’ll figure out a way around it. They always do 
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Jun 18, 2023 23:11
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H110Hawk posted:Our "squirrel proof" feeder actually works pretty well surprisingly. The baffle they just jump over, but the combo seems to discourage them. The smartest one has learned that if it sits on the peanut tray it can eat from the feeder without triggering its defenses. We've since made that guy discouraged with a spicy cylinder. It was hilarious to watch it grab a bite and be suddenly disappointed with its life choices. Now it generally steers clear for the whole contraption. actionjackson posted:well i meant something hanging, but the base is on the ground and connected by a pole or w/e See above.
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Jun 18, 2023 23:21
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thanks - I can't put anything into the ground as it's a concrete patio. honestly I could just hang one up anyway.
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Jun 19, 2023 01:39
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actionjackson posted:thanks - I can't put anything into the ground as it's a concrete patio. honestly I could just hang one up anyway. I mean, not with that attitude.  What you hang it from doesn't really matter, I just like the stuff we have setup right now. The spicy cylinder + squirrelproof feeder have seemingly made them disinterested when there is easier food elsewhere. We've actually seen it close on a squirrel before which is funny to watch. You get a bit of a dusting of the capsacin all over which deters them and some other predators. Pretty sure that's what that amazon link is to - the green feeder pictured.
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Jun 19, 2023 01:42
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actionjackson posted:thanks - I can't put anything into the ground as it's a concrete patio. honestly I could just hang one up anyway. does your patio have any kind of railing or fence? if so, you can get feeder stands that clamp to railings. they work pretty well. https://www.amazon.com/MIXXIDEA-Extended-Adjustable-Planters-Lanterns/dp/B089Q6RHRZ/ there's also wall-mounted feeder pole like this: https://www.amazon.com/AJART-Hanging-Bracket-Suitable-birdhouses/dp/B07WVZF578/ or free-standing tripods like this: https://www.amazon.com/Petsfit-Asphalt-Shingles-Outdoor-Feeders/dp/B074W2RG8D/ or you could go a bit fancier: https://www.amazon.com/Yard-Butler-YTBC-4-Feeder-Hanger/dp/B0061O3DXU/ i can't speak from experience on how much weight the tripods can support, and bird feeders CAN get heavy if you go big, so keep that in mind. also keep in mind that no matter what you do you are going to get seed and seed shells all over your patio. this will keep the ground-feeding birds happy, but it does get messy, and you may or may not want the seed mess (and the bird poop) on your patio. anything for hanging plants will support bird feeders, too, and sometimes hanging plant things are cheaper than bird seed things. something else to consider. edit: plant stands can also work out okay provided you have a way of keeping rats at bay, if rats are a problem in your area. the ol' spicy seed can do the trick. as i mentioned in the thread previously, i mix this stuff with my seed and it works incredibly well. https://www.amazon.com/Coles-FS08-Flaming-Squirrel-8-Ounce/dp/B00416S4YS/ my cat is norris fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Jun 19, 2023 |
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Jun 19, 2023 13:18
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thanks - i have a four foot aluminum "fence" with a railing there is a patio above me that I could hook something onto the underside too this one looks to be recommended a lot (the price isn't an issue for me) https://bromebirdcare.com/squirrelsolution150/ i didn't really think of there being bird crap everywhere! actionjackson fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Jun 19, 2023 |
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Jun 19, 2023 16:50
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If you want to attract birds to your yard but you're worried about rats/squirrels or don't have birdfeeder infrastructure you can always put in some kind of bird bath or water feature. They're super easy to DIY, I have one that's literally just a ceramic serving dish with glass marbles and water in it. There's ten million varieties of bird bath you can get. Some types of bird will only come to certain kinds of feeder, but all birds need to drink water. It's a good way to see a nice variety.
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Jun 24, 2023 18:48
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Look for something with a rough-but-still-glassy finish so the birds can get traction on it but it's still washable
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Jun 24, 2023 23:42
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In the last week I've had two different spooky pigeons show up at my bird feeder. 
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Jun 25, 2023 19:09
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