Blog Post 4 -- Bird Stealing Bread

I’ve always noticed how many more people come out when the weather warms up. Today I noticed the birds. In addition to the crows who hang out at the South Pond every day, there were smaller birds with higher chirps joining in the call-and-response. They were hard to spot. Several sat at the top of a tall tree where the crows normally hang out. And another group, with a different chirp, sang from a patch of thick, bare trees inside the zoo. The warmth is relative, of course. Today, the temperature crawled above 25 and the sun came out. It felt like spring after weeks of frigid temperatures in the teens and lower. After a few visits to the pond where nothing seemed to move, today the squirrels dug in the snow and dirt while the birds filled one another in on the latest news.

The surface of the pond was still frozen and covered with a couple inches of snow. I wandered around a little, looking at the prints running back and forth across the ice, hoping to see signs of the coyote. The prints were all rabbit. In the middle of the south end of the pond there’s an island, home to small animals who might be vulnerable to predators on the ground, or so the signs say. With solid ice between the island and the land, that’s not the case in the winter—or this winter. Last year they would have been fine. I wonder what kinds of animals or birds live on the island. The rabbits have been moving back and forth, but they’re not predators. Do they attract predators who might see the prints? I also wonder if there are hundreds of rabbits, or a couple dozen who are very busy.

After the rabbit rush hour

Still the activity level was more subdued than at the pond to the north. Each week I become more curious about the differences between the two ponds. North Pond is noisy with geese and ducks, but I know this is partly because people feed the birds, despite signs all over the place explaining that bread isn’t good for the geese. A few years ago and I saw a man sitting on a bench tossing Flaming Hot Cheetos to the pigeons and geese. How can someone possibly think that’s a good idea?

As I wondered about the redesign of the pond and which animals stayed, which ones left, I noticed a mass in one of the bare trees on the island. It was far enough away that I couldn’t tell if it was a nest or a large bird. I have to confess part of me wanted to pick up something heavy and toss it to see if whatever it was would fly away. But I know that’s just a few steps short of tossing chemically coated snack food to geese. So I used my camera to try to get a closer look. It was a sleeping bird, folded up in a ball. Only after I got home and zoomed in my already zoomed-in image did I notice there’s another. The zoo’s blog recently featured a Cooper’s hawk who visits the pond, with a few photos of the hawk eating a pigeon. I can’t see a tail, so wonder if it’s an owl. Either way, it looks like the man-made wilderness appeals these two, who don’t care about humans and their junk food.

Who's sleeping in the tree?

Bird Stealing Bread, by Iron and Wine