The process by which the fledglings learn to feed themselves is clearly a tricky one and today the garden was filled with groups of birds at different stages in the learning.
A family of sparrows, possibly two families, had a clutch of youngsters, not long out of the nest to judge by their plumage and gaping mouths, who moved as a noisy mob around the lawn, and later clustered on the branches of the greengage tree, whilst their parents worked on the fat balls.
There was a starling pursued at every turn by two plush fledglings whose incessant cheeping meant that they could be tracked through the garden. From time-to-time, the adult would fly off, but dutifully returned to feed their gaping beaks. The youngsters were obviously trying to feed themselves – copying their adult, sticking their beaks, open and closed, into the grass, but not really knowing what to do next. They didn’t seem to have grasped the mechanism whereby they needed to locate food items, pick them up and then eat them.
Two female woodpeckers visited. One came late and attacked the nuts at the base of the cone feeder. Another came earlier and with a fledgling who parked itself on a nearby tree trunk. For the first time, there were two woodpeckers in the garden at the same time. The adult worked horizontally towards the top of the wire to lever out pieces of peanut, which it then passed to its offspring. Clearly, the youngster didn’t think that the food was coming quickly enough and hopped onto the other side of the feeder, where it clung vertically and securely enough to take a couple of experimental pecks at the nuts. However, the adult rapidly moved it back onto the tree trunk and I wondered when the young bird’s skull is hard enough to take the impact of repeated knocking on hard surfaces?
thekitchensinkbirdwatcher 