[Climbing up on the soapbox] Your story actually made me a little bit ill. Did you say something to the B&B owners as well as the maintenance man? I get so frustrated when we, as bird advocates, don't try to educate people about predation and its effect on declining species (and I'm as guilty as the next). Evening Grosbeaks are in serious decline, down 78% since 1967, and collisions with windows and predation by crows cause huge numbers of fatalities in so many species. I guess as I get older it's becoming harder to just walk away from things like this.


Elizabeth Collins

Portland, OR


Message: 3
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:20:45 -0700
From: "Dave & Jo Nunnallee" <nunnallee at comcast.net>
Subject: [Tweeters] Evening Grosbeaks meeting their maker
To: <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
Message-ID: <000c01cc2b99$b655f8e0$2301eaa0$ at comcast.net>
Content-Type: text/plain;??? charset="us-ascii"

Hello Tweets,

We spent this past weekend in Winthrop; just outside the door of our B&B
there were two seed feeders hanging in protective shrubs, and they were
frequented by numbers of Evening Grosbeaks. The feeders are ~80 ft apart,
and there is a hot tub half way between them with 5 ft high cedar walls.

We noticed a pile of grosbeak feathers near the hot tub; clearly some
opportunistic predator was enjoying the feast at the feeders. Later we saw a
stressed Evening Grosbeak nearby, under a picnic table, mouth agape, belly
on the ground. Hmm, what's going on here?

That afternoon I was talking with the maintenance man who described how the
grosbeaks were meeting their fate. He noted that there were piles of
feathers all over the lawn (I later observed seven!), and he had witnessed
the attacks repeatedly.

Not raptors, not cats, but crows! The crows worked in teams of two. One crow
would swoop down on the feeder from one side, flushing the grosbeaks out.
With perfect timing a second crow would swoop down over the flushed birds,
forcing them close to the ground. Oh, did I mention that the hot tub has a
small, 1-ft tall window pane around the top of the wall? The crows were
forcing the grosbeaks to crash into the window. When a stunned bird fell to
the ground a crow would drop down, stand on it to hold it down, and peck it
to death. It would then make a meal of the grosbeak.

According to the maintenance man the crows have repeated this coordinated
attack many times and have made an easy living on the feeder birds. Why
don't the owners put decals on the hot tub windows? Dunno. maybe they like
crows.

David Nunnallee
Sammamish, WA
nunnallee at comcast.net