AN INTIMATE AVIAN EXPERIENCE

For a unique and intimate experience with waterfowl and other birds, visit George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary west of Ladner, British Columbia.

Reifel Refuge, as it’s called by many, is a 300-hectare (740-acre) plot of land on Westham Island on the Fraser River, about an hour’s drive from the metropolis of Vancouver. George Reifel bought the land in 1927 and established a family recreational retreat on it, creating waterfowl habitats as well as road access by a series of dikes and causeways.

In the 1960s, the Reifel family granted a lease to the British Columbia Waterfowl Society to create a bird sanctuary on the land. Helped by the management of Ducks Unlimited Canada, wildlife habitat was preserved and expanded with the provincial government establishing a game reserve on adjacent land. In 1972, the family further donated and sold the land to the federal government on the condition that it would be maintained as a sanctuary.

The government designated part of the sanctuary and the area adjacent to it, some 328 hectares, as the Alaksen National Wildlife Area. Some activities are permitted on this land but not the free access to the public that characterizes the sanctuary.

The sanctuary charges a nominal entrance fee and is open from 9 am to 4 pm every day. Sometimes it has quite large crowds, not a place to go if you want to get away from people for your nature experience. However, the high density of humans day after day is what has conditioned the birds to be as unafraid of us as they are.

The sanctuary was set up for waterfowl, and there is always a good representation of local waterfowl species, both dabbling and diving ducks. Large numbers of Snow Geese migrate through the adjacent wetlands, some of them remaining for the winter, and mostly those will be seen overhead moving between feeding areas. All the ducks present are somewhat used to people and will furnish close viewing and great photo opportunities.

There is a small population of resident Sandhill Cranes, most of them not pinioned, and some of them will feed from the hand. Some of them are good at gently taking seeds from an open palm, but be aware that you’re taking the chance of a poke with a sharp beak from those that aren’t. There are also Black-crowned Night-Herons roosting near the entrance to provide good looks at another unexpected species.

There are feeding stations everywhere, and during the winter they attract great numbers of seed-eating birds, for example Black-capped Chickadees, Red-winged Blackbirds, Spotted Towhees, Fox, Song, and Golden-crowned Sparrows, House Finches and House Sparrows. The chickadees are so tame that anywhere along the trails they will land on your hand if you open it with sunflower seeds on it. Occasionally a Red-breasted Nuthatch may do the same.

Brown Creepers and kinglets are also often seen, and like other birds there are quite tame. Quite a few other passerines inhabit the patches of woodland, and unusual visitors are seen with some regularity, for example Bohemian Waxwings and Pine Grosbeaks recently. And it’s always worth watching for less common sparrows such as Swamp, Harris’s, and White-throated along the path.

Because of all the feeders and seeds, rats and mice and Eastern Gray Squirrels (including the black morph, established in the Vancouver area) are also attracted to the area, and the local owls know it. A pair of Great Horned Owls is regularly seen, and there are always Northern Saw-whet Owls present, if very hard to see in the dense foliage where they roost. Other species of owls are seen from time to time, and there are usually hawks and falcons about, interested in the songbirds as well as the rodents.

You can buy sunflower seeds at the office and carry them around to feed to whichever birds you like. You may give them all to chickadees, as there is something wonderful about one of these tiny birds landing on your hand. You may be attacked by Mallards before you barely get going onto the trail, and Mallards are the most abundant and insistent ducks in the place. But look closely, and among the Mallards there will be at least a few American Wigeons and a few Northern Pintails.

More than these, there are Wood Ducks scattered around the area, and they too are interested in handouts if they can get to them before the omnipresent Mallards. They are shy enough that you’ll have to seek them out, but one way to feed them is to put seeds on top of fence posts, which the Wood ducks—tree dwellers that they are—can easily get to. Of course they have to beat the chickadees and Song Sparrows to them.

Dennis Paulson

BAND-TAILED PIGEON

You’ve doubtless seen the pigeons feeding in the city square or along the freeways roosting on light standards and nesting under the overpasses. These are Rock Pigeons (Columba livia), formerly called Rock Doves, and they are native to Eurasia but have been introduced all over the world, first as captive birds and then established in cities, towns and the countryside outside of captivity. They are rock-dwelling birds that nest on cliffs, and they see our city buildings and barns as just another kind of cliff.

However, we also have a bona fide wild pigeon in the Pacific Northwest, the Band-tailed Pigeon (Patagioenas fasciata). These are birds of the forest, birds that roost in trees and not on buildings. They are common west of the Cascades, occasionally seen on the east side. Many migrate south in autumn, but good numbers persist through the winter in areas where they can find food, both wild and human-provided.

We are fortunate that Band-tailed Pigeons are easily attracted to bird feeders with mixed seeds, as they are really quite attractive birds. They look something like Rock Pigeons but are slightly longer-tailed and rounder-winged, evident when they fly overhead. They are gray above, with more reddish underparts and a dark band bordered by a pale tip on the tail (thus the name). The bill and feet are bright yellow, and there is a white half-collar on the neck with an iridescent patch of feathers behind it.

These pigeons are vegetarians with a varied diet. Their range coincides with the range of oak trees throughout much of the West, and they eat a lot of acorns. But they also take pine nuts, fruits of all kinds, seeds of herbaceous plants, especially grains, and a variety of buds and flowers.

Band-tails build flimsy nests of twigs well up in trees, averaging about 10 meters but up to 50 meters above the ground. The nest is usually on a firm limb not far from the trunk. They lay a single egg, quite unusual among pigeons and doves, which usually lay two. The egg is incubated alternately by both male and female for about 18 days to hatching.

Both parents produce “pigeon’s milk,” a curdlike substance that sloughs off from the inner walls of the crop (production mediated by prolactin, just as in mammalian milk!); this is unique to pigeons. The young bird (“squab”) remains in the nest for three or more weeks and may be fed by the adults after it fledges.

There has been an uptick of interest in Band-tailed Pigeons in recent years. A group of researchers are committed to de-extinction of the Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), and they are moving rapidly toward that goal. Their method involves working out the genomes of both species and the systematic replacement of Band-tailed Pigeon with Passenger Pigeon genes: “converting viable Band-tailed DNA to viable Passenger Pigeon DNA.” They have now fully sequenced both species, so stay tuned!

On October 30, a juvenile Band-tailed Pigeon landed on the feeder right in front of me, and it looked just enough like a Passenger Pigeon, not seen alive for over a century, that a chill ran over me.

Dennis Paulson

PINE SISKIN—INVASIVE NATIVE

The winter of 2012-2013 has seen record number of Pine Siskins (Spinus pinus) in the Pacific Northwest. Numbers in the thousands have been reported on some Christmas Bird Counts. What's going on? It turns out that siskins are cyclic, on the average peaking in a given area in alternate years, and the peaks on occasion are very high. Thus they have a two-year cycle. The cause of this cycle is usually thought to be food availability, which varies in both space and time.

Siskins are among our smallest birds. They are members of the finch family Fringillidae, a family of interest because of its adaptive radiation into the seed-eating niche. The biggest species eat large seeds, the smallest very small seeds, and so forth. Pine Siskins eat a great variety of seeds of weedy herbaceous plants in the summer, but in winter in the Pacific Northwest they are strongly associated with red alders (Alnus rubra).

Alders bear their seeds in small conelike structures, and the slender bill of the siskin is well adapted to extract these seeds. Flocks of siskins visit alder trees and spend quite a bit of time working through the abundant cones. These flocks can be of surprising large size, up to and over 100 birds, but are usually smaller.

Pine Siskins also eat a variety of other seeds, from dandelions to hemlocks, and are frequent visitors to bird feeders, especially preferring thistle seeds. Unfortunately, this can be their undoing, as they seem very subject to infection from salmonella, which is spread in their feces. Birds may defecate while at feeders, and thus the salmonella bacteria are spread from bird to bird. Most winters, people who feed birds report sick and dead siskins at their feeders, sometimes dying right on a feeder.

Pine Siskins are very aggressive little birds. Perhaps they have to be because they go around in flocks, and a bird has to defend its feeding site against others. But they are also aggressive toward any other species, and at feeders, it is an impressive sight to see a siskin chase away a larger finch or sparrow. Siskins often have yellow in the wing and tail, and larger yellow patches may enhance a bird's success in driving away others.

Dennis Paulson

BIRD FEEDING – SHOULD WE DO IT?

In North America, more people feed birds than ever before. The number of bird feeders is surely in the millions all across the continent. In some urban and suburban neighborhoods, it seems as if most yards have a feeder or two. However, any quick survey will show that some of them have not been recently replenished. Bird feeding has its aficionados, but not all of them are passionate about it.

So many people feed birds that a cottage industry of feeders and food types has sprung up. A trip to the nearest Wild Birds Unlimited store will make that clear. Seed feeders are among the most common, with a wide variety of seeds, especially millet and sunflower seeds. Look at the ingredients of a bag of some of the fancier seed mixes sometime to see the breadth.

Suet is another ingredient in the cuisine served in many a yard. This fat-based item has always been especially favored by birds during the low temperatures of winter, but there are now many “no-melt” types that provide food during the heat of summer as well. You can get suet now with just about anything in it, from raisins to insect parts. Suet diversity follows the evolutionary pathway common to all of our consumer items, although it’s not clear how much difference all these additives make to the birds.

Presumably most people who feed birds are sympathetic to animals and nature, and surely the majority are environmentalists. But as such, shouldn’t we be thinking about what effects we are having on the birds and the environment? What are the pros and cons of bird feeding?

It strikes me that there are really two positive aspects of bird feeding. First, we are supporting bird populations (or at least individual birds). This is probably not very important during the summer or at any time when there is plenty of natural food available. Most birds live in places that furnish sufficient food and adjust their migratory behavior to the availability of food.

But there is always the possibility of unusually hard times, when weather phenomena make food suddenly more difficult to obtain. The most obvious example of this would be a heavy snow storm, blanketing the ground and all the potential food on and in it. Think of a finch eating weed seeds or a jay digging up cached acorns. Suddenly, these resources would be unavailable, and the presence of a dependable bird feeder could make all the difference between life and death. This could be called “bird benefit.”

The other important positive aspect of bird feeding is human benefit, to bring the birds closer to us in greater numbers. Birds that come to a feeder daily are in far greater density and variety than we would see just by randomly looking out the windows of our homes. This must be a prime motivator for many people who feed birds. Of course, our gaining a better love of and understanding for birds in this way probably benefits the birds as well.

Are there negative aspects of bird feeding? The seeds that spill from feeders are avidly eaten by rats at night; some of them are out in broad daylight! For those who don’t like rats much, this is a consideration, although they are usually out of sight and mostly out of mind. Many people also consider Eastern Gray Squirrels unwelcome pests at feeders, as indicated by the great variety of “squirrel baffles” on the market.

More seriously, bird feeding does affect the birds. Feeders attract birds near houses, and occasionally a bird will be startled from a feeder and fly into a window with fatal consequences. Of course, many birds strike windows even without feeders.

Our feeders also may attract predators, from bird-eating hawks to cats, and by concentrating the prey at a feeding location, the predators may have an easier time capturing them. This is surely the case for cats. Some have even called these locations “cat feeders.” In addition, parasites and diseases are surely more easily spread when birds gather at abnormal concentrations of their food. Seed-eating siskins and grosbeaks may contract salmonella and even die at feeders during outbreaks of that disease.

Hummingbird feeders are particularly widespread; hummingbirds seem to find them readily no matter where they appear. These feeders have been responsible for dramatic changes in the winter range of some North American hummingbirds, and their presence has allowed Anna’s Hummingbirds to greatly expand their breeding range in all directions, including far to the north.

As a resident species, the Anna’s have to take the consequences of a hard freeze and a feeder-owner without the motivation or opportunity to keep the feeder thawed. Perhaps there are so many feeders that there is usually an alternate one not very far away. One consequence that has not been examined is the loss of pollination by flowers that were formerly visited by migratory hummingbirds!

Bird feeding has even become part of the tourist industry. Numerous sites in the New World tropics feature clusters of hummingbird feeders that attract hundreds of individuals of up to a dozen species of hummingbirds, providing education as well as recreation for nature-minded tourists.

In any case, there is no concrete evidence that feeding birds is either totally good or totally bad for them, so we can use our own judgment to decide. We might not put food out because we are concerned that a bird might fly into one of our windows because of the feeders. Or we might put food out just to enjoy their presence, perhaps even helping them survive a cold snap.

Dennis Paulson

feeding birds

People often ask me whether feeding birds is good or bad. Perhaps it’s both. I feed birds because I love to have them in my yard, not because I think I’m doing them a great favor. In the lowlands of the western part of the Pacific Northwest, perhaps the only time we really aid birds by feeding them is when snow covers the ground, making it difficult for some species to find food. That’s when I see species at my feeders that I didn’t even know were in the neighborhood. Varied Thrushes and Fox Sparrows are two good examples.

Normally, natural selection eliminates the least capable individuals from a population during hard times, and by our feeding them this winnowing may not take place. It may even boil down to helping individual birds to the detriment of the gene pool of their species. So when we make bird populations increasingly dependent on our handouts, we may be obliged to continue feeding them. Birds that normally winter in the tropics may take up residence at a feeder in the fall and not migrate south; they will probably be in trouble if the feeding is discontinued. Many birds (for example, Anna’s Hummingbird in the PNW) have probably expanded their winter range because of dependable bird feeding.

However, there is also a downside to bird feeding. Cats haunt the shrubbery and accipiter hawks visit from time to time; birds kill themselves against windows; and disease spreads readily at feeders. All of these sources of mortality are there without feeding, but the concentration of birds at feeders exacerbates them.

And then there is our subsidy of introduced species. I live next to a green belt in Seattle, with a nice variety of birds, but starlings often dominate the suet in summer and House Sparrows the seed feeders all year until a recent and surprising decline in both species in my neighborhood (lack of nest sites?). 


When Rock Pigeons visit, all too frequently, they easily displace native Band-tailed Pigeons. Millet feeders attract cowbirds, which parasitize native passerines, although cowbirds have also declined dramatically in Seattle. And don’t forget the gray squirrels and rats that compete with the birds (and eat their eggs). I don’t know any way to avoid this when feeding birds.

The feeding of waterfowl at parks is even worse, leading to the proliferation of semidomestic ducks and geese, as well as pigeons and sparrows. Diseases transmitted by these birds will of course infect wild populations. Birds of the native species are quite able to find their own food, but some of them become virtual beggars, a far cry from the traits for which we admire them!

It sounds as if I’m arguing against it, but in fact bird feeding at our homes is probably benign for most birds and furnishes much pleasure, as well as personal education, for us. There is also greater knowledge of the birds when their occurrence is recorded on Cornell University’s FeederWatch (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/) or  ebird (http://ebird.org/content/ebird/). In any case, the real favor I think we can do for birds is to fill our yards with plants that attract insects (just the opposite of the gardener’s strategy), bear edible fruit and bird-pollinated flowers, and/or furnish good nest sites. And lay off the pesticides.

Dennis Paulson