Its oh so quiet Shh Shh

[ConcinusMan]

Oh yeah, crows and jays around my area exhibit high intelligence, that's for sure.

I few times, I took a peanut and tied or glued it to a piece of string and dangled it from a branch or clothes line. Pretty amazing to watch how they use problem solving to get the peanut.

Scrub jays here will discover a robins nest, say with one egg in it. Instead of raiding the nest and eating the one egg, and possibly causing the robin to abandon the nest and go elsewhere, the jays will keep checking back, waiting for more eggs to be laid. They know that robins usually lay 3 eggs, sometimes 4, and those jays will wait until there's at least 3 eggs, then eat them. Pretty smart!


Another thing I noticed when I was working at the VA cemetery in Portland, Oregon...

Oregon Junco is a bird that nests on the lawn, directly on the ground. When mowing, if a nest was discovered, we started putting flags up to mark the location so it wouldn't get run over next time. It didn't take the crows long to figure out that where there's a flag, there's lunch. We had to stop flagging them because as soon as we did, the crows would go straight to any new flags and eat the eggs or young. It was like we were putting up a neon sign that said "EAT HERE"

We started marking them on a map of the cemetery and giving those to the mowers instead. Wouldn't surprise me one bit if the crows later learned to read the map too.

Whenever I feed peanuts to squirrels in my backyard, and a crowd starts gathering, the jays show up. They very carefully watch where the squirrels bury their peanuts, then swoop down, dig them up, and steal them. They jays are smarter than the squirrels when it comes to hiding their own stash. They look around to make sure nobody is watching and if another jay is watching, they will only pretend to bury the peanut, then while that keeps the watching jay busy digging, they go somewhere else to actually bury it.

[kibakiba]

The ones here are stupid. We have a bird feeder and one few directly into it and killed itself. Some of them knew to hit it to spill the seed out, but the few that died were really dumb. The smarter ones hit it feet first, the dumb ones... beak first. We had a woodpecker that would sit on the bird feeder and hit it for hours. It never got through and he seemed to be determined to get the seed inside. We found him dead the next day too, broken beak. Our area has a lot of weird things though, there was a gasoline spill in the pond a few years back and that's when we started seeing hand sized spiders and such. It's like a horror movie when you see them. They almost look like tarantulas.

[ConcinusMan]

Male woodpeckers will rap on anything just to make noise. It's not always about getting to something inside or for making holes. Also, I don't think that running into the feeder is because they're stupid. They're probably seeing a reflection of the sky, or some other illusion, so they think they can just keep on flying, or they think they're seeing another bird are attacking it. I mean, I can put a large mirror outside and eventually if not immediately a bird will kill himself by running into it. Doesn't mean he's stupid, just means he didn't know he was looking at a solid object.

Dang birds kept hitting my front bay window and dying. They would take off "into the sky" or so they thought, and BAM! dead.

Try painting stripes onto the feeder, putting stickers all over it, or some other method of making it appear like a solid object. Might help with cutting down on the dead birds.

[kibakiba]

It wasn't one that had a reflection, it was one that's painted. Hitting it caused the seeds to spill out, which they would start eating after they hit it, if they weren't stupid.

[Stefan-A]

Male woodpeckers will rap on anything just to make noise. It's not always about getting to something inside or for making holes.

Yeah, they're making their presence known to other males and especially females. They even select objects that make especially loud noise.

Used to have one that was fond of the metal roofing on our house.

[ConcinusMan]

Had a pair of Colaptes auratus' (Northern Flicker) nesting in a large, dying maple tree in my back yard two years in a row. They just about drove me insane with their rapping on the metal exhaust pipe to my natural gas insert fireplace. Naturally, it produced the loudest noise of any object within their nesting territory but it also was very loud in my territory. My living room to be exact.

After they completed their second year of raising broods in that tree, I figured the natural course of action would be to cut down and remove that tree. It worked. Problem solved. Not only did it stop the summer-long rapping, but it removed a hazard of falling wood on my home, and a source of leaves to my yard every summer - Autumn.

I hated that tree anyway. Dropped leaves all summer for 10 years before it got weak enough and hollow enough for the birds to nest in. The birds were just the final straw. That tree had to go.

[ConcinusMan]

[PINJOHN]

i remembered it was ground hog day yesterday on your side of the pond and was intending to ask the result [is the winter nearly over] but with the massive blizzard that you guys are having to contend with, that would have been extremely high on the list of stupid questions
hope every one comes through in one piece

[Stefan-A]

I'm sorry, but this is getting a bit too offtopic again. I'm going to have to move this to the official offtopic thread.

And he did get spooked by his shadow.

[drache]

I forget what part of the country the groundhog lives, but here he would have gotten spooked by slush falling from the sky, not his shadow