Column: The lord of the bird feeders

Published 6:15 am Thursday, June 26, 2008

By Staff
One of my favorite pastimes is watching the interaction of birds on the feeders. I have the feeders, one with sunflower seeds, another with mixed seed, a thistle tube and a suet basket all clustered closely together on one pole and things often get a bit congested out there. It's fascinating to see how the birds deal with this; who are the mild mannered and who the bullies are.
As you would expect, the pecking order tends to run pretty much by size, whoever is the biggest at the moment has free reign of the place with the smaller birds giving way without contest. What gets interesting is when birds close to the same size are vying for king of the block.
With the smaller birds like finches, the various sparrows, downy woodpeckers and such it seems they confine their squabbles to their own kind. They routinely fight amongst each other for top dog at the feeder but totally ignore other species of equal or larger size. When you get into the mid sized birds like cardinals, cowbirds and rose-breasted grosbeaks this still tends to hold true but there are frequent exceptions. Occasionally one of these middleweights decides it's going to lay claim to the feeder, or at least try. This seems to be an individual bird thing rather than a species tendency. Sometimes it's a cardinal, other times a rose-breasted grosbeak, though it's rarely a cowbird. This is not a macho guy thing as you might expect. In fact, it's usually a gal that gets cranky with the others. Perhaps she's thinking about all those hungry mouths to feed back at the nest or maybe it's just that time of the month for her. Whatever the reason, the confrontations are rarely serious, she usually gets over it pretty quick and things quiet back down to normal.
The real show comes with the heavyweights like blue jays, hairy and red-bellied woodpeckers and grackles. Mourning doves would be in this category, too, but I've never seen them push their weight around. We all know the blue jay's reputation as a bad-boy bully. They seem to take delight in audaciously bombing in on the feeder and sending all the other diners scattering. But this is more show than go. Often when someone of equal size stands up to him the blue jay backs down.
Just the other night a red-belly was on the suet block and a blue jay bombed in with his typical flare and bluster. The red-belly didn't so much as flinch. He unblinkingly glared at the jay with a venomous stare. It cracked me up when the jay wouldn't even look at the red-belly. As if trying to figure out how to graciously get out of this, the jay gazed up at the sky, perused the trees and looked down on the ground but would not meet the red-belly's dagger stare. The red-belly took a few more bites of suet to make his point then flew off. No sooner had the jay started working on the suet when a hairy woodpecker bombed in, apparently trying to emulate the blue jay's intimidation tactic. It didn't work. The jay lit into him and ran him all the way off the cluster of feeders.
Going with the size rules theory, then comes the, arrogant grackles. Their demeanor is as if they know nobody dares mess with them and that's pretty much the case. When a grackle moves in on the suet the red-bellies and blue jays suddenly remember they have important business elsewhere. One might think that's the end of the Who Rules The Feeder debate but it's not. The undisputed Lord of the Feeders, the one nobody even considers challenging, the master of intimidating show and bluster defies the size rule. But when he bombs in on the feeder and strikes a challenging pose with his jet black wings extended out like a cape and his scarlet shoulder epaulets flared in all their glory you know he's saying, "Anyone want a piece of me?" Of course, no one does. Everyone knows the red-winged blackbird rules the feeders. Carpe diem.