There is a small woodpecker that lives in our neighborhood (maybe a downy but I don’t have any photos). I have seen and heard it hammering on tree limbs and houses, which is totally normal, but one day I noticed it tapping on the seed pods that were hanging in our honey locust tree. It was there every day for about 6 weeks until the pods fell on the ground. It must have found something tasty in the pods to spend so much time working on them.
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Maybe they discovered the noise they make? ¿Do honey locust pods make any noise? Probably they do when dry.
That is impressive.
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They make a slight rattle when dry but it’s much quieter than the things it usually drums on. Since they hang from the tree, the bird can’t hit them very hard or they just swing around.
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Maybe that rattle stimulates an instinctive curiosity in the bird?
I was lucky to have Eurasian Hobbies nesting in trees nearby, only for 1 season alas, and watching the young learning acrobatics was very impressive:
Young catching a prey brought by an adult https://www.aerien.ch/files/images/falco_subbuteo_15_jpg.php
I’ve seen a few birds trying to swallow preys that were much too heavy for them, often Cormorans, but this was the only one I could shoot:
Common Merganser with a large appetite! She wasted quite a lot of energy with this fish… https://www.aerien.ch/files/images/mergus_merganser_3_jpg.php
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Did the merganser manage to swallow the fish successfully?
Not a chance, it could barely get the head in…
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So the fish was spat back into the water?
I once saw some Mallards drive off a hovering Northern Harrier by splashing the water with their wings in such a way that it sent a spray of water directly up into the air at the hawk, just like a hose aimed into the air. Never saw that before or since. Sadly, no video or photos.
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We have a family of scrub jays in our yard. Last year’s only surviving nestling LOVES baths. He’d sit in the neighbor’s bird bath just getting completely soggy and singing in the bath.
He now has his own territory (and mate) further down the street, but when his parents aren’t around he still sneaks back to enjoy the bird bath. Last week I saw him bath, get out, shake off, then look back at the bath and decide to go for another round… he repeated the whole sequence no less than 6 times, and was probably in there a good 20 minutes!
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