what birds eat

eek! ....... no, yay! ...... a mouse!

     Charles Allen recently forwarded these two great blue heron photos sent to him by Theresa “tay” Lyons from Lake Authur. On the morning of October 23 she photographed the bird as it foraged around her family's grain elevator. It's probable that many of you don't know what great mousers great blue herons are. Ditto for cattle egret. I think herons and egrets in general will down anything 1) that they can catch and 2) that can fit down their gullets.

     If you live over in the ag lands, rice country in particular, you're going to be dealing with mice and rats – mice and rats in such numbers and diversity that regular people could scarcely perceive or imagine.

     Come harvest/post-harvest time, the rodent population duly explodes, and dinner is served – both for the rodents and the rodent-eaters. Due to the uber-high fall/winter rodent population, the diversity and numbers of rodent-eaters which they attract correspondingly rise. Great blue herons and cattle egrets are but the tip of the iceberg. Add in red-tailed hawk, red-shouldered hawk, marsh hawk, cooper's hawk, barn owl, great-horned owl, short-eared owl, mink, raccoon, and yes, coyote, and the iceberg grows. For a fact, the rice country of southwest Louisiana attracts some of the highest winter concentrations of all of the abovementioned, making it an outstanding place and time to view wildlife.

 ring-billed gulls food-freakin' during a ricefield water-leveling operation

many species of sandpipers (including these Least Sandpipers), plovers, and other shorebirds

utilize rice fields during fall, winter, and spring (photo by Dave Patton)

     Add in the dozens and dozens of species of other herons/egrets/ibis, ducks and geese, gulls and terns, sandpipers and other shorebirds attracted to the aquatic life of winter-flooded rice fields; as well another few dozen species of wrens, warblers, sparrows, and other songbirds that secret themselves in the dense hedgrows around irrigation canals and field edges and you've got a real smorgasboard of bird life happening. I once saw a belted kingfisher, perched happily up on a utility wire adjacent to a rice field – with a medium sized crawfish flailing in its bill. Many of you non-rice farmers/crawfishermen would be shocked at the number of bird species that routinely utilize crawfish in their diets.

Barred Owl basks after successful fishing trip

 photographer either Dave Patton or Stacey Scarce...or somebody else.....

     I've got a billion winter rice field stories, but of my favorites involves a pair of coyotes that I watched for an entire cold, sunless December afternoon behind Paul and Darnelle McIntosh's northern Vermilion parish home. There in a large rice field complex, they were stalking mice and rats along the narrow, brushy levees stitched throughout the rice fields. Carefully creeping and sniffing, they worked as a team, pouncing high like buckin' broncos onto the poor rodents they'd find.

     I've had a quasi-obsessive interest in food habits of animals – especially birds – for a long time now. Maybe it's because I've taken the time to learn to identify both animals and vegetation (alas, many birders choose to remain oblivious to the identity of the non-bird animals and plants they are constantly encountering in the field; likewise for plant-lovers on their field trips). Maybe it's just because I love food.



                                                                     Birds 'n Berries

Eastern Bluebird with native viburnum fruit, Dauphin Island, AL, 17 Oct 2010

photo by Dave Cagnolatti

     At the behest of an ornithologist friend, I coordinated a five-year Survey of Bird Frugivory in Louisiana (Journal of La. Ornithology Vol. 4 No. 2, Winter 1998). Frugivory is the act of eating fleshy fruits such as blueberries, hollies, cherries. Together with 25 other field observers, we amassed a database of over 1,000 bird/fruit observations involving 67 bird species which were observed consuming some 57 species of fruits (mostly native).

red-bellied woodpecker eating wild hawthorn fruits

photo by Beth Erwin

     Probably half of the observations were of the “expected” variety, such as robins and cedar waxwings eating holly fruits, or mockingbirds eating elderberries. On the other hand, I think that all of us were uniformly surprised at the degree of frugivory exhibited by woodpeckers. In all, we recorded 7 species of woodpeckers eating all manner of fruits including persimmon, black cherry, sumac, mulberry, dogwood, and many more.

     Another surprise involved the degree of frugivory exhibited by flycatchers, particularly during the fall migration period (July-Oct), in which they focused on two plant species in particular: prickly ash (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis) and rough-leaf dogwood (Cornus drummondii); and were also substantially interested in bird pepper (Capsicum annuum glaberisculum).

     In terms of diversity of bird species attracted, know what the all-time best plants were? King of 'em all was hackberry (Celtis laevigata), followed closely by Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia), and . . . (drum roll) . . . poison ivy. Yep. Poison ivy berries proved attractive to not only the typically frugivorous species like robins and mockingbirds, but also several species each of woodpeckers, warblers, and sparrows, not to mention chickadees, titmice, kinglets, and others.

evil poison ivy (note tiny berries in back)...wanna know what it's good for? ask just about any bird or mammal....

photo by James Beck

     Other high-scoring plants included black cherry, red mulberry, elderberry, pokeberry, southern magnolia, wax myrtle, and black gum.