Woke Sunday to a male turkey displaying to females inches from my bedroom window, also robins building a nest on the house.
I got 2 new yard birds on Earth Day: a singing BROWN THRASHER, and a HERMIT THRUSH scrounging around under feeders. An interesting thing I noticed was the feet of the Hermit Thrush would alternately tremble very fast, twitching side to side. I didn't know if it was healthy, until I checked BNA this morning and, low and behold, this behavior is called "Foot quivering." >From BNA: "Foot-quivering (using feet to shake and scare insects out of clumps of dead or newly regenerating grasses) has been observed as a foraging maneuver by Hermit Thrush... Interpreted by Dilger (1956a) and also Brown et al. (2000) as a ritualized ambivalent intention movement of simultaneous, conflicting drives to attack and to retreat; but also may serve as foraging technique used to locate insects under leaf litter. Brackbill (1960) and Kilham (1977) cite observations of foot-quivering while foraging, with no indication of the birds being disturbed." Cheers, Robyn Bailey Lansing -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
