Wild Bird Wednesday – How To Eat a Serviceberry

Hi everyone! It’s Cindy here. A few weeks ago I showed you some of the birds that were feeding on our serviceberry tree. We also have a shrub form that sets its fruit just a little later than the tree. These shrubs have been a hot bed of bird activity recently. As you will see each type of bird has their own method of feeding on the berries. Don’t forget you can click on the images to see a larger version.

Let’s start with the American Robin.

The stem is a good form of roughage.

Grasp the berry in your beak and then…

…toss your head up and pop it in your mouth.

Another bird that uses the swallow whole method is the Cedar Waxwing.

First you have to find the right berry.

Pluck the berry from the stem and…

…down the hatch it goes.

We haven’t see or heard from our Baltimore Orioles much in the past few weeks but I did see one in the serviceberry bushes enjoying some fruit.

Female or Juvenile Baltimore Oriole stabbing a serviceberry.

The last of the birds that usually snarf the berries whole is the Eastern Bluebird.

Let me see which one is the ripest.

I’ll take this one…

…but I’d prefer to take it to another tree to nibble on it.

The bluebird surprised me by flying off to another tree with the berry. He set it down on the branch and surprisingly it didn’t roll off. Then he settled in and picked away at it until it was gone.

Some of the smaller species enjoy the serviceberries too but they can’t eat them whole. Here the Tufted Titmouse demonstrates how they eat.

This berry looks tasty.

I’ll hold it in my claw so I can peck at it.

Finally one of the smallest birds in our yard, not including the hummingbirds, also enjoys eating the serviceberries. Here a Black-capped Chickadee demonstrates his method.

I like to grab the berry while it’s still attached and hold it in my claw.

It’s easy to peck at while you hold it.

Do I have some berry on my beak?

If you look closely at the last picture (click to make bigger) you can see a tiny piece of berry in the chickadee’s beak.

While I was shooting these pictures Charlie was on a photo safari of his own in the yard and captured this picture.

This is how I get pictures of such small birds.

Here I am shooting pictures with my new FujiFilm X-T3 camera. I have a 100-400 mm lens and a 1.4x multiplier. As you can see I am hand holding the camera. I could never do that with my old Nikon. This set up weighs about 4.7 pounds (2.1 kg) compared to the Nikon equivalent that weighed over 9.5 lbs (4.3 kg). I do use a monopod occasionally for extra stability and to lighten the load from hanging around my neck. I’m really enjoying getting back into bird photography. Our yard is so full of bird activity right now I’m having a difficult time keeping up with all the pictures I’m taking.

I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into the birds we see around our yard. I’m joining the Wild Bird Wednesday blog hop. You should stop by and see some more birds.

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Wild Bird Wednesday – Hand Feeding at Mendon Ponds Park

This week I am continuing my posts on birds in our area and joining Wild Bird Wednesday. This week the series of pictures is a little blast from the past, however you could easily replay this scene today if you wanted to try. Mendon Ponds Park is a treasure where you can find lots of wildlife. It is also where Charlie took the picture of the Bridge at Quaker Pond. There are miles of hiking trails as well and you can go from open field to wooded habitat to open water in minutes.

One of the fun things about the park is that because of regular nature hikes hosted Wild Wings, a not-for-profit educational organization that houses and cares for permanently injured birds of prey housed in the park, the black-capped chickadees in the park are accustomed to being fed by the human visitors. For this reason we usually keep some sunflower seeds with us whenever we visit this park.

On this particular visit we had forgotten the seed in the car and when we were almost back to the car a pair of chickadees began harassing us like a couple of pan handlers for some seed. I quickly ran to the car and retrieved the sunflower seeds so we wouldn’t have any bloodshed on our hands.  😉

It didn’t take long for the chickadees to start visiting Charlies hand. At first they were flying off to eat each seed after their visit but eventually they started stashing them in the bark of nearby trees.

While this was taking place a female white breasted nuthatch watched closely from the tree directly behind Charlie.

She seemed to be getting her courage up and even hung upside down from a small branch…

…before finally taking the plunge.

She was cautious but eventually made her selection.

Once she made that first step she continued to return for more seed.

A great finish to a wonderful day. We never thought we would be able to hand feed a nuthatch!  Charlie and I haven’t been back to the park for a while, but we hope to bring Millie to it to enjoy the sights, sounds, wildlife and hiking trails with us soon. We are just waiting for some drier weather.

I hope you have enjoyed this edition of Wild Bird Wednesday and will take some time to stop by the blog hop host too. And yes I posted this a little earlier than Wednesday in my time-zone, but that is because the blog hop is hosted in Australia.

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