Tag: birds
Mourning doves
As the temperature hits -20°C, all of the other mourning doves give Dave the silent treatment for convincing them not to fly south this winter.
Be vewy vewy quiet
Two signs about birds in Presqu’ile Provincial Park are meant to caution bird lovers. The first instructs people to approach a viewing area quietly so as not to disturb birds on the beach:
Another sign in the park alerts parkgoers to the danger presented by the bird hunt allowed in the park:
The perplexing thing is that these signs are both on the same post:
On Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, it’s Lookout #3. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, it morphs into “Look out!” #3. I hope the hunters are using silencers so they don’t disturb the birds.
Gone fishing
Given that they neither dive nor swim, I don’t normally think of crows as birds that catch fish. Yet as the lake ice was breaking up last week, there were three crows eating two relatively large fish that they’d caught from somewhere. I didn’t see them actually catch any of the fish and they looked a little large to fly with, so my best guess is that they were scavenging fish that had been dropped by other birds. There’s also a possibility that they’d stolen the fish away from a flock of seagulls that were at the edge of the open water farther out in the lake.
Although this was most likely just a case of opportunism, there is actually some evidence of crows catching fish on their own. Here’s a pretty straightforward video of a crow catching a fish in water shallow enough for it to stand in:
And here’s a video (with explanation) that seems to show a crow fishing in an artificial pond by using bread as bait: