Re: Great Tailed Grackles, Mourning Doves, and Me

On Fri, 9 May 2008 19:58:19 -0700 (PDT), Jeannie <hpjeannie@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

> On May 9, 5:59 pm, "Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)"
> <reunite.gondw...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >
> > The behavior of the birds is fascinating.  There's a very definite
> > pecking order and we occasionally see some dominance games.  The big
> > male grackles honk (there's no other word for it) to settle things.
> > The doves get into little squabbles, too, and don't hang around when
> > the grackles show up.  A roadrunner dropped by to see what was
> > happening, but left and hasn't returned.  The guides say they'll eat
> > strips of raw meat; they sure don't eat bread.
> 
> What fun!  I love nature TV.  You really have a great selection of
> "channels."
> 
> I think roadrunners' usual fare is lizard, so the meat strips sound
> logical.

Lizards, s****s, baby birds, small rodents, big bugs.  All things I'm
not planning on putting in my bird feeder.  However, one of the sites
claims that they'll eat suet and, what a coincidence, the site sells
it.  OK, in fairness I have to add they sell all kinds of bird feed,
including the "wasteless" shelled seeds and nuts version that I
bought.

I'm not going to worry about too much about birds that don't like what
I put out.  They were getting along just fine before I started putting
food out, after all.  I'll have my house sitter put out food once a
week while we're gone for the summer.

Based on my extensive bird-watching here over the years, the favorite
food of the great tailed grackle is the fast food French fry.  They
cruise the parking lots and tidy them up, starting with the fries.
They're pretty bold about it, too, although they won't actually try to
take the fries out of your hand the way the Steller's jays will in
Yosemite.  My dad, who worked running horses in the Wasatch and was in
the CCC, called jays "camp robbers" and it's a pretty accurate name.

Groceries just got delivered and, speaking of bread, I didn't get the
La Brea sourdough baguettes I'd ordered.  Instead, I got plain La Brea
baguettes.  If I don't get them into the freezer pretty soon, the
birds are going to be feasting on genuine artisan bread because that
stuff goes stale very quickly.  The sourdough hangs around a lot
longer.  Fortunately, now that I've cleared a vast amount of bread out
of my freezer, I've got plenty of room for the new stuff.

Mary "You didn't think I was buying bread for the birds, did you?"
-- 
Mary Shafer   Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote re****ts about it.
reunite.gondwana@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 or miliff@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 my blog at http://thedigitalknitter.blogspot.com/