In an uncharacteristic burst of Saturday afternoon industry, I decided to amputate some of the lower hanging branches from the oak tree in our front yard. I grabbed the pole-mounted pruner and got after it.<\/p>\n
I eventually worked my way over to a particularly dense grouping of limbs, and as I thrust the pruner up into the midst of the branches I was startled by the sight of a bird plumeting to the ground, where it began to flap pitifully. I immediately recognized the ploy; it was a dove — presumably female — and it was doing a rather over-the-top version of the oh-dear-me-I’m-lame-and-helpless-so-come-and-get-me act that a number of species of birds employ to draw predators away from their nests.<\/p>\n
Sure enough, ignoring the wallowing dove, which by now was flapping its way across the street and into the neighbor’s yard, I peered into the mass of limbs and spotted the ragged nest (doves are not particularly adept at construction work). I laughed to myself at the earnest histrionics of the hen (again, an assumption) even as I marveled at the maternal instinct at work.<\/p>\n
However, I was caught completely off guard by what happened next.<\/p>\n
As I resumed my pruning work, another<\/em> bird burst from the same vicinity. This one had blue plumage and it was not pitiful…it was flying with a purpose. It was a blue jay, and as it flew past me, I could see that it was carrying a piece of felt or a tuft of fuzz in its beak. It flew around the corner of the house, and I figured it was taking the cloth to supplement its own nest. But I noticed that instead of continuing to fly, it landed in the lawn, whereupon it started stabbing at the cloth with its beak. Very odd.<\/p>\n I decided to investigate so I walked toward the jay, which fled the scene, leaving behind whatever it had been stabbing. As I got closer, I got this sinking feeling that I wasn’t going to like what I found, and that was confirmed as I came upon a tiny baby dove, as yet unfeathered but covered in the fur-like coat that precedes feathers.<\/p>\n Its body was still twitching but it was obvious that it was mortally wounded, and indeed it died a couple of minutes later.<\/p>\n In a cruel irony, the mother bird’s efforts to draw me away from the nest actually resulted in the death of one of her progeny, as it left the nest unprotected, and the opportunistic jay swooped in and grabbed the baby bird. I’ve always thought of jays as the thugs of the bird world, but, frankly, I hadn’t realized that they are omnivorous; some quick googling confirms that the behavior I witnessed is not out of the ordinary<\/a>.<\/p>\n Doves are among the least intelligent creatures you’ll ever encounter, but you can’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy after such a scene. It’s a tough world out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s a tough world out there, and sometimes your best efforts to cope with it can backfire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-wildlife-birds","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6492,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3716\/revisions\/6492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}