A LITTLE WEIRD BIRD

      We have a conventional bird feeder in our backyard and I watch it daily. It is tall

and thin, with several little doors on each side for the birds to pick up the tiny pellets. There are little metal perches outside of each window for them to stand on. The other day I saw something that seems very weird. One of the medium sized birds (not a dove, nor a tiny swallow) but  was standing on the lever outside of one of the feeder windows “chucking” more and more pellets out the window and down to the ground. I use the word “chucking advisedly – it literally stuck its bill through the window and scooped them out “en mass”, over and over again. It would pause, eat a few pellets, and then resume scooping them out the window, scattering them on the ground. It seemed so obviously deliberate, almost planned

            Of course, the other birds, of all kinds, would hustle around on the ground picking the pellets up. When I say “pellets” I mean small pieces of the bird food. We do the same routine every few days and I watch the birds a lot, but have never, in 25 years, seen anything like this behavior. If a larger bird stans on the little perch, its weight is too much for it and the perch-bar simply moves down, making it impossible for the bird to reach any pellets through the window. This is all very regular and normal.

            However, to have one bird actually “feed” the others in this way strikes my as very surprising. I am wondering if any of you folks have ever seen anything like this. Believe me, I shall be watching every day to see if this phenomenon ever happens again. It seems to me that either this particular little bird was feeling sorry for the others, or it simply had gone out of its mind. Has anyone ever heard tell of a bird that “shovels” food out of the feeder so its mates can have more than enough to eat?

            Clearly, birds, like many other creatures, are in their own way “smart”. They use their various senses in figuring out the best way to find and ingest their foods. But this particular behavior strikes me as extremely abnormal. It seemed to know exactly what it was doing and did so quite deliberately. Perhaps it is the St. Francis of the bird family, having heard about the Saint who fed birds and decided to do likewise. I shall keep my eyes open for further sightings.

            I do have a real bird-watching friend coming bye for a visit soon and I shall put the whole mystery to her. I’ll let you know what she thinks. I know what I saw and although my eyes are sometimes questionable, I am confident that this little bird was stealing our bird food. Perhaps he is the “Robinhood of the aviaries”.