Feathered friends continue to amaze
From songbird couples with wandering eyes to busting myths about hummingbirds and hawks
Songbirds are monogamous. Hummingbirds won’t migrate unless hummingbird feeders are taken down after autumn. And hawks kill outdoor pets. We’ve all heard these stories and are inclined to believe them because we anthropomorphize birds by giving them human attributes.
But birds have been around since the age of dinosaurs, which is far longer than we’ve been around. Their behaviors may seem like human behaviors but are assuredly not.
For starters, birds don’t get married but instead form pairbonds for breeding purposes. Pair-bonds among blue jays may last several years, presumably because it confers an advantage of familiarity with a mate from one breeding season to the next. But most songbirds form relatively short-term pair-bonds and have no concept of sexual fidelity. For instance, pair-bonds of some northern cardinals will stay together for several breeding seasons while many others will break up their pair-bonds quite frequently. Cardinals and other songbirds don’t break pair-bonds in the human sense of divorce. They’re probably looking for better breeding partners. Also, breeding pairs of cardinals will readily mate with neighboring
cardinals. It’s a behavior called extra-pair copulations, which is rampant among songbirds. Paternity tests have shown that about 4 out of 5 juvenile songbirds have mixed parentage.
The overriding goal for songbirds is reproduction. The more breeding partners, the more babies. The more babies, the more chances for species survival.
A persistent folktale tells us to take down hummingbird feeders after autumn to make sure hummingbirds migrate south. But migration is hardwired into hummingbirds. They’re going to migrate, regardless of the absence or presence of sugar-water feeders.
Stories abound about hawks killing pet dogs and cats. Perhaps. But hawks get food by hunting a variety of wild animals, from squirrels to rabbits, rats, snakes and even songbirds. Cats and dogs aren’t normally on their menu.
Hawks are unable to snatch up animals heavier than their own body weight. A Cooper’s hawk weighs about a pound and a red-tailed hawk about 2.4 pounds. Most pet cats weigh 7-10 pounds. Most pet dogs weigh more than 10 pounds, except for small breeds at about 4 pounds.
A hawk may occasionally attack a dog but would prefer attacks on rats and squirrels. A hawk attacking a cat could get fatally injured from the swipe of a cat claw, and no hawk would risk suicide for a meal.
Truth is, coyotes kill pets and let hawks take the blame.