Do you like birds?i

Post Reply New Topic

I do, except for the pooping. I don't like how they poop on you and poop on your car.

Birds are awesome

I like woodpeckers. They are a very beautiful bird. I also like owls.

Sometimes in the fall, a large flock of black vultures will make their homes for awhile on the tops of my tall trees. They are raptors with wingspans wider than my car. And when you have 30 or 40 of them together nesting in trees they are a sight to see.

Chicken, turkey, goose, duck, ostrich, quail, pheasant are all delicious.

^^Don't forget mourning doves.

I've had wild mourning doves as pets before and released them after they were either big enough to fly or recovered from their injuries. They went on to have nests in the yard and raise chicks successfully. I also had a purple finch once who had broken his wing and went on to live a long life as a cage bird. He was a good singer for sure, and sometimes liked flying around the house--not that he was any good at it with the crooked wing, but he liked trying.

I like crows and I like seagulls. Actually all birds are nice, though I am less thrilled about birds of prey.
I was interested to find that the robins in the USA are totally different birds to the robins here in the UK.

I've never seen the kind of robins in the UK. Our robins in America are basically thrushes with a two-tone paint job and an overactive digestive tract, though they are kind of cute.

Right. Well. Your robins are slightly larger then ours. Not by much. They have the same markings. A red breast etc., but what surprized me, was the comments made by the American lady I was speaking to about their character. She described them as being in small flocks, as in she would see groups of them land.
Our robins are very solitary birds. They are bold.. As in they will get fairly close if one is gardening, but the only time one will see more then one together is when the male and female are raising a chick or two, and even then they will be a distance between each other apart from when a parent comes to feed a youngster.
There maybe two or three around, but nearly always they will be on seperate trees etc. Never together like a flock.
It is when I realized that the USA robins may look the same but are a tad larger... But they are a totally different bird by the way they act. It is interesting.

(Or could it be that in certain parts of the USA robins are different birds and some parts have the same robins we have? I don't know!)

European and American Robins are different species belonging to different bird families and are not particularly closely related. European Robins do not occur in America, and American Robin is only a rare vagrant to Western Europe. The American Robin was apparently given its common English name by early immigrants due to its red breast although overall it doesn't really look much like the European Robin.

I like all birds although my favourite bird family is the auks. I don't mind poop. Being a regular visitor to large seabird colonies I've been pooped on quite a lot. I do like the smell of guano.

I like birds just fine, although not to a special interest level or anything. I always get excited when I see a kind I don't see very often. I'll never have a bird as a pet, though, one, because most of them are too noisy in close proximity and hurt my ears and two, because I don't think it's right to keep a bird cooped up and unable to stretch its wings and fly for its whole life but I don't want to have a bird pooping all over my house.

Exactly.

Seeing "the first robin" is a cliche sign of spring in both the UK and in the eastern US. But they are not even the same bird.

The English colonists who settled the eastern part of what is now the US saw the American red breasted bird, and named it after the familiar, unrelated, but vaguely similar looking red breasted bird they knew back in England.

The English speaking settlers also named an Australian bird "robin" that is unrelated to either of other two robins.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 16 Jan 2020, 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Birds and birdwatching are great.

Have a special love of raptors (hawks and eagles).

Have seen small sparrow hawks, large red tail hawks, osprey (fishing hawks- very large), and even the occasional bald eagle (largest bird I have ever seen for real outside of a zoo).

In the UK we see robins all year round. They stay here in the winter. We see them in all weathers and all conditions.

I guess that I am mistaken that that "sign of spring" thing was inherited from England. That might be just an eastern US thing.

American robins migrate, as do many European songbirds, and storks, etc. But some birds stay in the frosty north on both continents.

Some birds here migrate. Birds like swollows. Robins don't.