Observing birds at a feeder yields lots of lessons

“You can observe a lot by watching.”

This, of course, is a quote from Yogi Berra, who for you younger folks was a catcher for the New York Yankees baseball team a thousand years ago. He was known for his skill as a ballplayer and for sensical statements given his unique twist.

He’s right, of course. Birds are a particularly profitable way to observe a lot by watching.

This is early January, one of our snow days. A downy woodpecker has been clinging to our suet post for many minutes. The large snowflakes drifting down are piling up between the bird’s breast and the post.

I go out to replenish suet and the bird lets me get within a foot before flying off. Birds will perch motionless when they are aware of a predator, staying in place for as long as half an hour, according to the scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Or the downy had been sleeping. The same source tells us that songbIrds (woodpeckers are songbirds) nap throughout the day, while perched.

There is evidence, however, that at least one species of bird can sleep while flying. Scientists at the Max Planck Institutes in Germany fitted small brain-activity monitors and movement trackers to frigatebirds flying over the ocean. The study demonstrated that the birds can sleep for very brief periods (measured in seconds) in flight using one brain hemisphere or both.

While I was stuffing the post holes with suet a pileated woodpecker flew into the yard. There are two that make daily suet stops. They are shy birds. I expected this one to leave. No. It perched above me, waiting for me to leave the deck, then came to eat.

The downies seem to understand suet replenishment, often perching within 20 feet, arriving at the post before the deck door closes. Maybe the big fellow has caught on.

Once on the post, the pileated pointed its head straight up for several seconds, then went still, another post clinger. The bird must have seen something that put it on alert. It was there for five or six minutes, motionless except for throat movement as it uttered soft uck-uck-ucks. New behavior for me.

You can observe a lot by watching.

Ditto, the bully cardinals. A reader wrote to ask if our cardinals behaved as his do — males sweeping feeding females off the feeders, sometimes, it seems, just because they can. It doesn’t seem to matter if other feeding ports are empty. Males displace females on a regular basis.

We are visited this winter by one particularly bright red male. He also will displace other males, no tolerance for either sex at “his” feeder, that being the one chosen for the moment. (We’ve got tube feeders with four seed ports each, four feeders on different posts, certainly no lack of opportunity.)

Behavioral ecologists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology place birds into “dominance hierarchies” depending on degree of aggressiveness. These are commonly known as pecking orders. This happens between species and within species.

A study by postdoctoral associate Eliot Miller at Cornell used reports from the Lab’s Feeder Watch participants to create a dominance list, more dominant to less so.

Our common feeder birds stacked up this way: American crow at the top, then common grackle, red-bellied woodpecker, European starling, blue jay, red-winged blackbird, mourning dove, hairy woodpecker, brown-headed cowbird, Northern cardinal, song sparrow, downy woodpecker, house sparrow, white-breasted nuthatch, white-throated sparrow, house finch, red-breasted nuthatch, dark-eyed junco, purple finch, American goldfinch, and (no surprise) black-capped chickadee at the bottom.

Within the dominance hierarchy for cardinals we find the bully males. Plumage brightness can be an indication of aggressive behavior.

That’s why plumage is important when females make a mate choice in the spring. Females seek a male that will successfully defend territory and be a good provider, perhaps by dominating food sources.

Lifelong birder Jim Williams can be reached at woodduck38@gmail.com.