Staking out the Birds

Like hunters, bird watchers who have patience and perseverance often capture more birds by their binoculars than those who don’t. An especially fruitful practice for bird-hunting by either guns or glasses is to stake out our objects of desire at promising spots. Food is the foremost lure of wild animals. So finding (or setting up) a place with things they like to eat is an obvious first step.

For plant lovers, your keen observations of the yearly cycle of leafing, blooming, fruit-setting, leaf-shedding, etc., come handy in choosing a stake-out point. In fall, the ripened fruits on many plants attract birds large and small, from band-tailed pigeons, cedar waxwings, American robins, red-breasted sapsuckers to towhees, sparrows and chickadees. A tree, shrub or vine with a heavy load of bright-colored ripe fruit is a perfect location for a birder to sit and wait.

Early this week, we saw hermit thrushes galore; they were taking Summer Holly’s (Comarostaphylis diversifolia) orange drupes up in the trees and down below the trees. They have a discriminate taste, picking only the healthy fruit.

Hermit Thrush on Summer Holly, November 7, 2017, by Minder Cheng.

Last week, a hermit thrush was in the bush of Snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus) by alpine granite bed, sometimes perching gingerly on the thin branch, sometimes hovering in the air, and sometimes walking around on the ground, all for the purpose of getting the most palatable fruit. In my eye, the waxy white drupes looked the same. Endowed with greater visual acuity, the bird knew which ones were best. Once it inspected one fruit that had dropped, and left it there. We walked up after it flew off, and even we could see that this berry had a yellowing spot at one end, apparently an indication of its inferiority.

The Snowberry rejected by Hermit Thrush. November 1, 2017.

For me, it’s often the birds that alert me to the fruits that I would have missed. Without seeing a hermit thrush flying into Hackberry (Celtis reticulata) two weeks ago, I wouldn’t know that the small berries were ripening. Two years ago, we also saw a fox sparrow pecking at the berry’s thin pulp.

This year from October up to now, several other bird species were also seen eating fruits in the garden: purple finch on Twinberry (Lonicera involucrata), golden-crowned sparrow on Snowberry, pine siskin on Mountain Alder (Alnus incana ssp. tenuifolia) seed, and Steller’s jay carrying acorn (Quercus) in its beak. The latter two kinds of food, botanically speaking, are parts of fruits borne by angiosperms.

If you want to experience intense observations of bird feeding (other than setting up a bird feeder), go to those plants in the botanic garden with fruits at their prime, stand or sit at some distance, and wait. Your patience will be handsomely rewarded.