In terms of Wildlife photographers there are many excellent practitioners out there. I have recently been entertained by 2 excellent photographers on the Olympus UK e-Group forum who have posted fascinating pictures of bird feeding behaviour
with many thanks to Peter and Peter I would like to ask if there is anyone who can comment on how usual or otherwise the following feeding behaviours are.
The first is from Peter Drury who is based in Portsmouth and posts wonderful wildlife pictures in his on-line gallery
The selection in question was entitled Duck! There's a flying crab! and can be seen in the e-group in detail where Peter explains how the Mallard picked the crab up and refused to give it away despite being mobbed by the Black Headed Gull.
As Peter says "The normal food of a Mallard is small aquatic invertebrates, seeds, roots, shoots and grain. A crab hardly falls into any of these categories.Comments welcome as always"
The second fascinating picture I have seen recently was from "PeterBirder" from Braintree in Essex who also posts excellent wildlife pictures in his on-line gallery
Peter posted a fascinating series of pictures showing a male Blackbird trying to feed a whole mouse to his offspring
Once again the full thread of pictures can be seen on the Olympus e-group
This Peter commented that "My take on all this is that the adult is inexperienced and possibly a "single dad" as we haven't seen the female or the third youngster that were around last week. I suspect that the mouse was killed by one of the local cats and "dad" saw this as an opportunity as worms are in short supply as "Andym" has suggested. I think that during the day one of the larger local birds, possibly the Sparrowhawk has taken the mouse".
Once again he would love to hear from anyone who has any experience of such behavior - please feel free to leave a comment here and we will pass it on to them
Their pictures and comments are re-posted here with their very kind permission permission and they retain full copyright over both
Anyone watching Springwatch tonight on the BBC tonight will have seen a description of the Blackbird behavior
ReplyDeleteIt is apparently a reasonably well known phenomenon when the ground is really dry and hard and they are unable to get worms as they are spending their lives too deep underground
Basically they are opportunists and given a shortage of their normal foodstuffs they will take any opportunity that comes along