We love birds, but do they love us?
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When I checked out two bags of sunflower seed at TSC the other day the cashier said, "The birds are going to love you!"
I'm not sure birds feel a sense of gratitude to humans who offer food in winter and water for drinking and bathing in summer. When the feeder is empty birds will often land on a window sill and peer in as if asking "Where's the grub?" It looks more like a sense of entitlement.
Humming birds exhibit a sense of propriety. They wage spectacular aerial combat among themselves, no quarter given. Often a male, you know by its ruby throat, will perch near a feeder and sally forth to drive off any and all who try to get a sip. It will tolerate a mate.
Unlike hummers, among house or purple finches it's the hens who rule the feeder roosts.
Mates will defend one another's access to a feeder. I think goldfinches and maybe rosebreasted grosbeaks exhibit this behaviour.
Chickadees seem to have, if not affection, then fearlessness around humans. They will perch on your shoulder or sit on the feeder while you refill it. One day a chickadee rode on the feeder right into the shed when I took the feeder in to fill it from the barrel of seed.
Canada jays have this same confidence. We haven't seen any of them for several years, but they showed up late in the fall several times when we were at the cottage on Taylor Lake.
They'd help themselves to a sandwich right off your plate and take it up in a tree to eat it beyond your reach. The only other birds I've seen with such bad manners were grackles in Florida. They came in three colours, bronze, brown and yellow. They have the most baleful eyes, fiercer than eagles!
A pair or two of blue jays attend our feeder here in Straffordville. They aren't as aggressive as their northern kin, not as large either. They can peck out a seed and flit to a limb of the maple to chip out the meat with no problem. The northerners are so much larger they can't get their heads close to the openings on the same side as the perches. That calls for craning around a corner.
Mourning doves come to our feeder. They eat off the ground like chickens. I witnessed a dove under our feeder at the cottage display behaviour that forced me to rethink my conception of their nature. That bird, confronted by a saucy chipmunk, fluffed its feathers and raised its hackles until it looked twice the size. Its colour changed from drab gray to brilliant orange and white. It lowered its head and advanced on the rodent. The normally brazen chipmunk fled the field.
A pair, or maybe two pairs of cardinals visit us. Like the doves they usually feed on seed that's been scattered under the feeder.
From time to time the juncos, buntings, everybody flee into the centre of shrubs and we know the neighbourhood cooper's hawk is likely doing a fly by.
Twice last week, and possibly oftener, so swift and elegant is its flight, a sparrow hawk swooped down, picked up a bird in its talons and carried it up into the maple tree. Only its head and tail were visible to us, the rest hidden behind a branch. It may have enjoyed its lunch there, but I never saw any feathers fluttering down or on the ground later.
The sparrow hawk, American kestrel, is the smallest of our raptors. You may espy them on utility wires or fence posts. From those vantage points they can scoop up a mouse from the grass before it has any sense of impending doom. They never toy with their food like a cat does.
We might be tempted to use the pellet gun on the hawk but I know it must eat. I tell myself it is eating reconstituted sunflower seeds.
Maybe it loves me.