Today after coming home from teaching my section (the last thing I had to do before spring break), I decided to go out and feed birds for a while as a way to start relaxing after two of the more stressful weeks so far of my graduate student life. Two first experiences:
1) Usually I’m ready to go back inside before the feed in my hand is gone, but today I stayed long enough for the chickadees to clean out my hand. Well, not quite. There were plenty of millet seeds left. But chickadees don’t think much of low-fat diets. Sunflower seeds and peanuts are what they’re after. Anyway, after they’d carried off all the worthy items, a couple of chickadees decided that the thing to do would be to stand on my hand and peck it as hard as they could. For utterly harmless looking birds, they managed to give me some healthy jabs with rather sharp beaks. What I’m trying to figure out is what they were trying to accomplish. I didn’t think that the skin on my hand looked like a promising place for hidden seeds. But I’m also a bit reluctant to think chickadees smart enough to attribute intentional states to me of the sort that would be required if they thought that they were signalling to me that I needed to get more feed.
2) I also had a Song Sparrow perch on my foot for quite a while eating the millet seeds that the chickadees didn’t see fit to eat. Chickadees are brash birds that you can pretty easily get to come take feed from your hands, but this was the first non-chickadee that has dared to retrieve food from off of my body.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer