One of the sixth floor windows in the Natural Resources Building, home of WDFW in Olympia, had the feather oil stain from a Rock Pigeon that obviously hit it at high speed.? You could see the bill, head, eye.? Even the alulae on both wings.? We thought that a Merlin had chased it there.? But, since gulls did nest on the building it may have been one of them.

Hal Michael
Olympia WA
360-459-4005 (H)
ucd880 at comcast.net

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Price" < loblollyboy at gmail .com>
To: tweeters at u. washington . edu
Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2011 1:32:06 AM
Subject: [Tweeters] Re: Evening Grosbeaks meeting their maker

Hi Tweets,


Dave Nunnalee writes:? ?"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."


In Toronto, Ontario, the Ring-billed Gulls have learned to do the same to Rock Pigeons, to drive them into the glass windows of downtown office towers. I learned this from an article about two decades ago in the Brit journal, New Scientist, in an article entitled 'Jonathan Livingston Asshole' , a delicious little riff on the inspirational New Age hit of the day, ` Jonathan Livingston Seagull`.


Locally, the resident GW `s have not yet learned this trick, but it would be interesting to see a.) if they figure it out for themselves in downtown Vancouver, say, which has no shortage of large office towers or, b.) it`s an importable, transferable skill from RB`s elsewhere.



Clearly a learned behavior but, in either case, one of them had to have the idea first, then work it out in practice. Shows yet again to me that genius is not restricted to humans.



cheers


Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
loblollyboy at gmail .com

Every answer deepens the mystery.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? - E.O. Wilson

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