You may think you are seeing the same birds at your feeder each year, but think again. You may have a few repeat visitors, but Iain looks into just how many unique visitors you really have.
December 12, 2003: How Many Birds Really Come to My Feeder?
Hi! I'm Iain MacLeod from the Audubon Society of New Hampshire, bringing you Something Wild.
Now that the bears have definitely gone to their dens for the winter, it's time to get serious about putting up my bird feeding stations. So I dust off the cobwebs, scrub out the feeders, stock up on fresh seed and suet, and set everything up for my birds, who must be watching for me, as they immediately start munching on everything I provide.
I say, "my birds," but are these really the same birds that come to my feeder year after year? And I think of happy little families of woodpeckers and chickadees, but how many birds do I really have?
Some expert bird banders tried to answer this very question recently at a banding station in Connecticut. They had been banding Downy Woodpeckers for a number of years, so they were able to identify individual birds. Last year, they decided to do a census of the downies that came to their feeding station. They started at the end of November and went through February, as the winter is a time of year where birds usually stay put, so few individuals would be coming or going.
Before the census, the banders noticed groups of five woodpeckers at a time at their feeding station. Would you like to guess how many individual birds were counted during the census?
Would you believe there were sixty-two Downy Woodpeckers visiting this one feeding station? They were pretty evenly divided between the sexes, and a little more than a third of them were birds that had fledged the preceding summer. There were also many older birds, and many of them had been banded there in preceding years.
So it does turn out that many birds visit the same feeders year after year. But sixty-two different birds. No wonder the seed disappears so fast!
If you have a natural history question that you would like answered on Something Wild, email us at somethingwild@ nhpr.org.
Something Wild is a joint production of the Audubon Society of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Public Radio, and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. For Something Wild, I'm Iain MacLeod.
