Dogwood berries and rusty blackbirds

Dogwood berries are a popular food item with the outdoor critters. As the fall progresses our anticipation of the dogwood berry feasting spectacle grows. Who will come this year? For the last month squirrels have taken some. Mockingbirds appeared and began guarding trees. Then in mid November robins descended and began munching.

We speculate on what brings on the invasion. Are the berries "ripe" enough? Does a roaming flock come through the area and eats what it finds? I suspect the answer is the latter as everyone's trees are stripped at different times. Then there are berries on other tree species that remain untouched.

This year there were lots of American Robins, a few mockingbirds, some Northern flickers showing off those golden feathers and a few Rusty Blackbirds. No starlings or grackles were seen at the trees this season.





One of the blackbirds was caught in a mist net and so I obtained the close up photographs of the exquisite rusty edgings on feathers. The detail is rarely visible when a bird is viewed through binoculars amongst leaves in the uneven lighting of a tree.

Dogwood berries

There are three dogwood trees right by our house. Each fall a group of mockingbirds appear to dispute 'ownership' of this patch of food. The 'winning' mocker guards against all comers, except for the small birds. The chickadees and titmice are allowed to visit the feeders nearby and seek shelter in the dogwoods unharmed. Then a week arrives when the berries are either 'just so' or roaming bird hordes moving through this neighborhood spot the trees. A week of furious activity results as a mocker tries to chase off every bird from a large flock.

In past years the dogwood berry season is when the starling flocks visited. This year I've seen a flock across the lake but the birds have not come here. Last year a robin flock came and stripped the trees over a couple of days. The mocker tried to defend. The robin flock flew in low from nearby woods. This meant some of the birds went into the banding nets. I was looking forward to a repeat this year so that I could improve my knowledge of age and sex identification with robins.

So who is stripping the trees this weekend? Rusty blackbirds are eating the berries and there is no mocker defending. We've not seen one for several weeks. The Rusty Blackbirds fly high and dive down to the trees. Even though I had nets up near the bird feeders and dogwoods no blackbird came close to them. When startled, the birds flew straight up and away.

Surprisingly the Rusty Blackbirds ignored me most of the time. The banding station is between two of the dogwoods. The birds were even feeding on the ground near me.